Written by With a resounding thud of the gavel on December 13, 2011, technology powerhouse Apple Inc.® may have just lost all rights to the trademark name iPad® in a key economic market, China. The Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court has put forth a final answer on legal proceedings that have been occuring since 2006, when a Taiwan based holding company, Proview Electronics, sold the name trademark, IPAD, to Apple Inc. for a mere US$55,000 but apparently did not have the right to do so.
Between 2001 and 2004, and long before Apple came out with their iPad, Proview Technology, based in Shenzhen, China, began purchasing the IPAD trademark in various countries, including the EU, Vietnam, Thailand and China for a tablet PC product. Their product did not do so well, and Apple came to Proview Electronics to purchase the rights to the trademark name in order to secure it for the Apple iPad, which entered into countries’ economic markets in 2010. However, it appears that Apple lawyers missed the ball on this one, since Proview Electronics never had the right to sell the Chinese trademark, which is owned by Proview Technology.
In 2010, Apple began selling the iPad within the Chinese market even though they were still in litigation with Proview Technology over who owned the rights to the trademark name. Prior to the court proceedings, Proview Technology had offered the trademark name to Apple for US$10 million. Now though, the Chinese court has granted the rights to the Shenzhen based company, and Apple will be forced to either change the entire name of the product only within China, or pay US$1.5 billion for not only the name in question, but for damages as well. Apple lawyers declined to comment on the ruling, but Xiao Caiyuan, the lawyer representing Proview, says the prosecution team attempted to say that Apple did not know they hadn’t bought the Chinese trademark claiming, “[...] this was because they could not read Chinese.”
