Apple loses ‘iPhone’ trademark case in China News
Apple loses ‘iPhone’ trademark case in China

The Beijing Municipal High People’s Court ruled on Wednesday that Xintong Tiandi (XT), a local leather goods retailer, can continue to use the phrase “iPhone” on its leather goods. According to the Legal Daily, the official newspaper of the China Justice Ministry [official websites, in Chinese], the Beijing court placed much weight [Legal Daily report, in Chinese] on the fact that XT filed its trademark application to sell the iPhone-branded leather products in 2007, which is two years before Apple [corporate website] started selling its handsets in mainland China. The court found this sequence of events to be crucial in dismissing Apple’s appeal and stated that the technology giant could not prove that the “iPhone” brand was well known in China before 2009. However, this ignores the fact that Apple applied for the “iPhone” trademark in 2002, which was only approved in 2013. Apple has been disputing this matter since 2012, and stated that it was disappointed with the ruling and that it intends to appeal [Reuters report] to the Supreme People’s Court [official website].

Apple has been embroiled in controversy in China ever since it started operations in the country. In July 2013 New York-based labor rights group, China Labor Watch [advocacy website] accused [JURIST report] Apple, and its affiliate Pegatron [corporate website], which assembles products including the iPhone 4, iPhone 4S and iPhone 5, of withholding employees’ pay and imposing excessive working hours at factories in mainland China. In December 2012 a Beijing court ordered Apple to pay damages of 1.03 million yuan (USD $165,908) to eight Chinese writers and two companies for copyright infringement. The Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court [official website, in Chinese], a regional court directly below China’s appellate level courts, held [JURIST report] that software available on Apple’s app store contained unlicensed digital copies of the writers’ books in violation of the plaintiffs’ “right of communication through information networks.” That decision was the second in four months from the same court ordering Apple to pay USD $83,000 in damages for alleged copyright infringement of a Chinese encyclopedia publisher. In July of the same year, the Guangdong Hich People’s Court in China confirmed a settlement [JURIST report] reached the previous week in a trademark case whereby Apple agreed to pay $60 million [NYT report] to Shenzhen Proview Technology for the use of the iPad trademark in mainland China. Although Apple had already paid $55,000 for the trademark in 2009 to the company’s Taiwanese affiliate, Proview Taipei, the Chinese affiliate argued that Apple misled it by buying the name through a smaller company, IP Application Development.

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