iPhone trademark may not be owned by Cisco
Ed Burnette has an interesting article on ZDNet concerning Cisco’s ownership of the iPhone trademark. It appears there may be some doubt of Cisco still owning the iPhone trademark and may have rushed an iphone product to market only after Apple inquired about the use of the trademark.
¬ª Cisco lost rights to iPhone trademark last year, experts say | Ed BurnetteÄôs Dev Connection | ZDNet.com:
An investigation into the ongoing trademark dispute between Cisco and Apple over the name “iPhone” appears to show that Cisco does not own the mark as claimed in their recent lawsuit. This is based on publicly available information from the US Patent and Trademark office, as well as public reviews of Cisco products over the past year. The trademark was apparently abandoned in late 2005/early 2006 because Cisco was not using it.
This is definitely one for the lawyers to work out.¬ It may be why Apple decided to drop their negotiations with Cisco for the iPhone trademark and use the name anyway.¬ If Cisco doesn’t legally own the name, Apple would have been paying for nothing.
Moshe Maeir
It seems to me that iPhone was also used by Vocaltec when they introduced the first Internet Phone in 1995!