 "Apple can now use iPhone name in Brazil after winning lawsuit")
Apple’s troubles in Brazil are finally over. According to CNET, Judge Eguardo de Brito Fernandes ruled against Brazilian company IGB Electronica for use of the iPhone name. Earlier, Brazilian regulators had officially declared that Apple didn’t have exclusive rights to the “iPhone” name in the country. IGB had earlier argued that it owned the trademark filing for the iPhone name for its Android smartphone—the Gradiente iphone.
The trademark was originally filed in 2000, which was almost seven years before the launch of the first iPhone. However, the trademark was granted a year after the first iPhone launched.
Apple can use the iPhone name in Brazil
With a swelling middle class anxious to go online, Brazil is one of the fastest-growing markets for smartphones in the world. IGB Eletronica SA, a company formed after the restructuring of Gradiente, launched its ‘iphone’ line of smartphones last December.
The Brazilian company’s Android 2.3-based smartphone is being sold for 599 reais ($302) and comes both in black and white, just like Apple’s handset. Unsurprisingly, Gradiente’s price tag is much more palatable in comparison to the Apple’s offering, which costs four times as much at 2400 reais.
This is not the first time Apple has been stuck at an impasse with regards to the name of what is arguably its most famous product. The company had to grapple with Cisco Systems in early 2007 for the rights to the iPhone name in the US, a few months before the first model was released. Cisco had sued Apple for trademark infringement immediately after the iPhone was first unveiled at the annual Macworld conference in January 2007. Cisco contended that Apple had approached it over the name a number of times and even used a shell company to acquire the name. The two companies ended up settling in February 2007.
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