Wednesday, December 7th 2011
Apple Suffers Setback in iPad Brand Name Dispute with Proview in Chinese Court
Barring the Mac, Apple's rather generic-sounding brand names have often invited trademark disputes. Be it Apple's now resolved dispute of the name "iPhone" with VoIP major Cisco, or its rather bizarre claim to the word "App" that was stonewalled by a variety of industry majors such as Amazon.com, which it is likely to lose. A relatively unheard of brand name dispute has been over the name "iPad", which Chinese company Proview Technology claims to have been holding since before the release of the popular tablet device.
The Shenzhen-based company got an immediate respite when the Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court rejected Apple's claims to the iPad moniker. Apple had almost brokered a deal with the Taiwan branch of Proview, which the Shenzhen HQ rejected, sending the two in a legal tussle over the brand name. Proview claims to be holding the iPad brand name since the year 2000. Proview plans to take this minor yet significant legal victory forward in seeking an immediate halt of sales of iPad (at least in China), and about US $1.5 billion in damages from Apple, which it can appeal against the verdict in a higher court.
Source:
Reuters
The Shenzhen-based company got an immediate respite when the Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court rejected Apple's claims to the iPad moniker. Apple had almost brokered a deal with the Taiwan branch of Proview, which the Shenzhen HQ rejected, sending the two in a legal tussle over the brand name. Proview claims to be holding the iPad brand name since the year 2000. Proview plans to take this minor yet significant legal victory forward in seeking an immediate halt of sales of iPad (at least in China), and about US $1.5 billion in damages from Apple, which it can appeal against the verdict in a higher court.
34 Comments on Apple Suffers Setback in iPad Brand Name Dispute with Proview in Chinese Court
I coined the name iPAD a decade ago -- initial of 'Internet Personal Access Device'. The concept of the device is to do away with Windows, Office, Intel CPU, HDD, FDD, ...... It is solely used to access internet by individual who want to read news, get information, read and writte emails, communicate with friends, play games, access to coursewares, ......
*goes away to try and register "UMAD" (unintuitive money-hogging application developer)*
Aww shoot. Apple already took that.
I was the executive director of Proview -- the name that you might not want to hear now. Proview sold many tens of millions of monitors and TVs globally in the past decade under various names and OEM brand names -- the one that you use in might be made by Proview!
Be happy, Go lucky!
And no, Proview is not unheard of here. I have come across Proview CRT monitors in the past. Just that they looked like clones of Compaq monitors (unless Proview was an upstream supplier for HP-Compaq).