The affiliate marketing industry is already being burned by BS intellectual property law suits in the form of Essociate’s patented claim to have invented affiliate network technology, but in this week’s ridiculous I.P. news we hear that Apple is likely to have to pay $1 billion to obtain the "iPad" trademark in China.
The backstory is that Apple bought the iPad "global trademark" a few years ago from a British company that specializes in I.P. monetization, who had in turn bought it from Proview, a Chinese company that had registered the name as far back as 2000. The only problem is that the British company didn’t own the trademark for China, so the "global" trademark didn’t include it. Now, Proview has won a court ruling in China confirming its ownership of the trademark in China and they are suing Apple for $1 billion-plus.
Once again, as we have seen in the Essociate dispute and in numerous domain-squatting situations, this is an example of a company that adds zero value acting as a leech on a creative, innovative company. This doesn’t serve anyone well, except the leeches.
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December 19, 2011 at 9:52 pm
Since the internet were discovered,there are many things that made our work easier and faster because of technology.Even the use of cell phones were greatly developed.But we should also know how these things had started and the necessary things we can do to at least help on this matter.The Stop Online Piracy Act legislation is intended to curb Internet copyright infringement. If the bill passes,it will have a large effect on Internet accessibility to copyrighted content.Several think the act is well-intended.However,they also argue that it goes about achieving its objectives in a way that leads to more issues than it resolves.A House debate about SOPA was derailed yesterday by a snarky tweet.