Cisco demands Apple to pay Cisco's legal fees and relinquish all profits eventually made on the iPhone. The company also demands Apple destroys all labels, signs, packaging and other material that includes the word iPhone.
Cisco's trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office describes "computer hardware and software for providing integrated telephone communication with computerized global information networks."Now Cisco starts digging up the dirt, stating Apple embarked a campaign of "confusion, mistake and deception", in its effort to secure the rights. Cisco says Apple went as far as to create a phoney company called Ocean Telecom Services LLC to get around Cisco's trademark:
According to the lawsuit, Apple's iPhone is "deceptively and confusingly similar" to Cisco's - and, as technology advances, both phones could someday operate on the same networks and assume similarities in the user interface, hardware or software.
In an application to the U.S. Patent and Trade Office in March, Ocean Telecom billed itself as a foreign company doing business in Trinidad and Tobago. The company listed its attorney as James Johnson. His contact information was an e-mail address from Google's free web-based Gmail service.Cisco executives claim they would let Apple use the iPhone trademark, if the companies would communicate with each other to make the devices more interoperable:
On Thursday, the Apple spokeswoman said the company would not discuss Ocean Telecom.
No one responded to an e-mail that the Associated Press sent to James Johnson's e-mail account.
Despite harsh words in the lawsuit, Cisco spokesman John Noh said Cisco's attorneys are still willing to negotiate with Apple. He emphasized that Cisco - the most richly valued company in Silicon Valley, with a market capitalization of more than US$174 billion - never wanted Apple to pay cash for naming rights.
"Cellphones, work phones, home phones, personal computers - they're all converging. The value of that convergence is limitless, and the key to that is industrywide interoperability. It's a core tenets to our business."