Cisco's iPhone Trademark Battle with Apple
The big boys square to see who keeps the name "iPhone".

My guess is Steve Job's with be sending Mark Chandler some make nice money and a early Christmas present. Then strangely enough it will be announced the lawsuit was all a big mix up and misunderstanding. Ummmm, yeah riiiiggghtttt....

UPDATE on Cisco's iPhone Trademark

Commentary from Mark Chandler, Cisco's SVP and General Counsel, on Apple's infringement of Cisco's iPhone trademark.

Today’s announcement from Cisco regarding our suit with Apple over our iPhone trademark has spurred a lot of interesting questions. Most importantly, this is not a suit against Apple’s innovation, their modern design, or their cool phone. It is not a suit about money or royalties. This is a suit about trademark infringement.

Cisco owns the iPhone trademark. We have since 2000, when we bought a company called Infogear Technology, which had developed a product that combined web access and telephone. Infogear’s registrations for the mark date to 1996, before iMacs and iPods were even glimmers in Apple’s eye. We shipped and/or supported that iPhone product for years. We have been shipping new, updated iPhone products since last spring, and had a formal launch late last year. Apple knows this; they approached us about the iPhone trademark as far back as 2001, and have approached us several times over the past year.

For the last few weeks, we have been in serious discussions with Apple over how the two companies could work together and share the iPhone trademark. We genuinely believed that we were going to be able to reach an agreement and Apple’s communications with us suggested they supported that goal. We negotiated in good faith with every intention to reach a reasonable agreement with Apple by which we would share the iPhone brand.

Read all about it here, courtesy of blogs.cisco.com.

-Eric