News

Cisco CEO: iPhone Lawsuit a "Minor Skirmish"

Thursday, January 25th, 2007 at 10:10 AM - by

Had Apple been willing to negotiate over the use of the term iPhone, the lawsuit over the name could have been avoided, according to Cisco CEO John Chambers. He describes the lawsuit itself as a "minor skirmish," reports the International Herald Tribune.

Cisco acquired the trademark to the iPhone name in 2000, but didn't use it until releasing its VoIP phone product recently. Apple announced its iPhone - a smartphone product that does not use VoIP technology - during Macworld Expo 2007 in early January.

Mr. Chambers said that his company told Apple for five years that it was willing to license the iPhone name. "All we ask is that people respect our trademarks and our intellectual property. We would have traded that for just interoperability," he said.

Apple contends that it does not need to license the iPhone name from Cisco, claiming that several products already use the moniker.

During Apple's first quarter financial report, COO Tim Cook commented "We think the Cisco trademark lawsuit is silly... There are already several companies that use the name iPhone for voice over IP products, and we believe that Cisco's U.S. trademark registration is tenuous at best. We are the first company to ever use the iPhone name for a cell phone, and if Cisco wants to challenge us, we're confident we'll prevail."

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Jan 25, 2007 1:13 pm

Seems like most of the noise about this is coming from Cisco. It's like they are trying to win their case via the press rather than in court. Reminds me of SCO.

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nealg said:

member since 22 Mar 2006 with 120 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Jan 25, 2007 1:20 pm

Didn't SJ talk about the iPhone being in development for the past 2.5 years? Interesting that the Cisco comment that they say they tried to sell it to Apple 5 years ago. Why would Apple have done anything with the name 5 years ago? Why would they even be talking about it unless Cisco was looking at it as IP that they could sell at the time. Sounds like the baloney meter is swinging pretty hard on this one.

Neal

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Biff said:

member since 08 Apr 2004 with 1479 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Jan 25, 2007 2:26 pm

Guest wrote:
Seems like most of the noise about this is coming from Cisco. It's like they are trying to win their case via the press rather than in court. Reminds me of SCO.
Of course the noise is coming from Cisco! It's their trademark! Just as with a patent, its their responsibility to get it enforced. Cisco is a business. Why on Earth would they NOT pursue violation of their trademarks??

nealg wrote:
Didn't SJ talk about the iPhone being in development for the past 2.5 years? Interesting that the Cisco comment that they say they tried to sell it to Apple 5 years ago. Why would Apple have done anything with the name 5 years ago? Why would they even be talking about it unless Cisco was looking at it as IP that they could sell at the time. Sounds like the baloney meter is swinging pretty hard on this one.
Again I'm not sure what the problem is here. Cisco owns the trademark. They noticed Apple had other i products 5 years ago, so they thought they'd try to make some cash buy selling the trademark. Apple declined. Apple phone rumors have been around forever. As yet, Apple has refused to license or buy the trademark from Cisco, so the iPhone trademark belongs to Cisco. Therefor, they are doing the right thing by enforcing their trademark.

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Rainy Day said:

member since 07 Jun 2005 with 607 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Jan 25, 2007 3:57 pm

Apple first approached Cisco, not the other way around, in 2001 to try to buy the trademark. Cisco said at the time that it wasn’t for sale.

Now Cisco is changing their story and saying they tried to sell it to Apple five years ago. It’s pretty clear that Apple is right about Cisco playing a weak hand in this skirmish.

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Jan 25, 2007 5:34 pm

If Cisco hasn't enforced their iPhone trademark on previous other companies with iPhone products their case will be pretty weak.

If you fail to enforce your trademark you will lose it. Apple is betting on the fact that several other iPhone products exist already

and Cisco hasn't gone after them. They show the judge that and the judge will look at Cisco and see their whole plan for what it

is, a weakly disguised grab for $$.

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gslusher said:

member since 13 Nov 2002 with 2051 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Jan 25, 2007 7:52 pm

Biff wrote:
As yet, Apple has refused to license or buy the trademark from Cisco, so the iPhone trademark belongs to Cisco. Therefor, they are doing the right thing by enforcing their trademark.

All we can say is that Apple would not agree to Cisco's terms. We don't know what those terms were. They keep talking about "interoperability," which is hard to make sense of. Their iPhone is a VOIP (Skype) handset. (It may not be all that good--check the user feedback on Amazon, for example.) How would that "interoperate" with the Apple phone?

Some other factors: the Linksys iPhone may be a previous product that was renamed. Why was it renamed in mid-December, not long before MacWorld? If they wanted to sell their VOIP handsets as iPhones, why didn't they call the first one they made iPhone? That would have avoided some of the questions. It looks like (wild guess) that Cisco was trying to get something from Apple--it's not clear what, though they have said that it's not about money. When Apple refused to give them what they wanted, they rushed a product to market, after filing what some have said may have been a defective declaration, if it was just an empty box with a pasted-on label, but there was no real product.

Of course, none of our opinions means diddly-squat. It will be up to a judge, eventually, unless they settle. The Canadian company (Comwave) probably has a better case, though we'll have to see, there, too. Apple apparently filed first, but Comwave came out with a product (a VOIP service). There may be a solution there, too: Apple could agree not to enable VOIP on their phone in Canada.

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nealg said:

member since 22 Mar 2006 with 120 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Jan 25, 2007 8:17 pm

Again I'm not sure what the problem is here. Cisco owns the trademark. They noticed Apple had other i products 5 years ago, so they thought they'd try to make some cash buy selling the trademark. Apple declined. Apple phone rumors have been around forever. As yet, Apple has refused to license or buy the trademark from Cisco, so the iPhone trademark belongs to Cisco. Therefor, they are doing the right thing by enforcing their trademark.[/quote]

Biff,

If you read what I wrote, I commented that maybe Cisco tried to sell it to Apple. I don't know for a fact that Cisco shopped this to Apple because of the i in their iPhone. I am surmising and presenting an opinion about what may have happened here.

My other point was that something doesn't add up unless Cisco did try to sell the i in iPhone to Apple. Jobs says the iPhone in development for 2.5 years. Chambers says he tried selling the name to Apple 5 years ago. This is what usually happens when someone tries to fight these types of things in the court of public opinion. We usually don't get all the facts, just the convenient ones that do more to support one side over the other.

For me, it will be interesting to see what the real facts are in this case. I take all public statements with regards to this with a grain of salt.

Neal

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