Intrigue behind the Cisco and Apple iPhone settlement
The battle over the iPhone name has come to a resolution, with Cisco and Apple settling the trademark dispute by agreeing to work together. This rather bizarre and amicable settlement has fanned speculation that perhaps there was more to this dispute than meets the eye.
Very few details of the settlement have been released, but the companies did say that Apple would be able to use the iPhone trademark in exchange for the two companies working together to explore interoperability between the company’s products in the areas of security, consumer and business communications. Both companies have dropped all legal action related to the iPhone trademark.
This settlement comes as no surprise to anyone who’s been watching this case (an outcome I predicted back on 10 January ).
The background to this story is that Cisco filed a complaint in the San Francisco Federal Count in early January just after the iPhone was announced at the MacWorld Expo. Cisco stated that Apple’s iPhone “will share an identical sight and sound and strong similarity of meaning” with the iPhone trademark that it owns in the US.
Cisco launched a line of iPhone VoIP phones in mid December. It said that it owned the iPhone trademark in the US since 2000, when it purchased InfoGear Technology. Cisco alleged that Apple’s new phone was ”deceptively and confusingly similar” to its own VoIP phones.
Apparently, negotiations over the iPhone trademark broke down just before the iPhone announcement at MacWorld. Now it seems that the sticking point was Cisco’s demand that Apple engineers its products so that they can communicate with Cisco equipment.
If this is indeed the case, Cisco has played very high-stakes, high-risk game to develop a business partnership with Apple, and the executives at Cisco must have balls of steel (something you can’t usually say about executives in big companies).
On the other hand, some commentators are wondering whether there was something else going on, and whether the “interoperability” issue is simply a cover up.
For example, Aaron Wright at Apple Matters wonders whether it was a marketing stunt by Cisco to promote its VoIP phones.
While Alex Zaharov-Reutt at itWire wonders whether Cisco feared a backlash from Googlee, which is a major customer, and so decided to settle on that basis. Google’s CEO Dr Eric Schmidt is on the board of Apple.
Personally, I think both companies simply realized that if it did come down to a legal battle, it would be long, hard and damaging, and both companies simply wanted a way out without loosing face.
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