The news that what's arguably the world's best known company, Apple, is unable to continue selling what's arguably the world's hottest product, IPad, under that name in China will give IP lawyers the heebie-jeebies. Others will no doubt experience a certain schadenfreude. If you've done a trade mark clearance exercise, you'll know that even finding a name that's available in South Africa can be tricky. Imagine trying to do it worldwide, as many multinationals need to do from time to time. All those translations, all those transliterations! And it certainly doesn't help if you choose a rather weak and obvious name like IPad, which is likely to be quite popular. When Apple needs to prepare for a new launch it decides on a name and then uses an agent (or special purpose vehicle) to buy up whatever registrations it needs – it obviously doesn't want to go in as Apple, with the 'Hi we're Apple, we'd like to buy your trade mark registration, but please bear in mind we're a tiny start-up and we really don't have much to spend on a name' approach unlikely to succeed.
In 2006, Apple started buying up registrations for IPad, including registrations in China, South Korea and the EU from a Taiwanese company called Proview. The price: a mere US$35 000. But Apple's lawyers slipped up - the Taiwanese company didn't in fact own the Chinese registration, this was owned by Proview's Chinese subsidiary or associated company, Proview Shenzen. The news reports aren't nearly as well written as this one, of course, but it seems that the sequence of events was this - by the time Proview was asked to arrange for the transfer of the Chinese registration, it realised that it was in fact dealing with Apple and it raised the price significantly; up yours said Apple, at the same time asking a Chinese court to order the transfer of the registration and claiming that it had simply made a mistake because it didn't read Chinese; tough luck Apple said the court, you should do proper due diligences (remember parents, when it comes to subject choice for your children, Mandarin's far more useful that Pedi!). So Apple doesn't have a registration in the only country where anyone can still afford an IPad. A country where over 1 million of the silly things were sold in the quarter April to June 2011. A country that accounts for 16% of Apple's sales. And now Apple's been sued for infringement and it has interdicts against it in two regions. With talk of further interdicts and a damages claim of US$ 1 billion. OH ...! (insert swear word of your choice). Happy holidays!
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