More Chinese shopkeepers hide their iPad stock
Fondleslabs tucked away ahead of trademark appeal outcome
More shops in China have been told to pull iPads from their shelves in the wake of the ruling that the fondleslab infringes on a trademark owned by Proview International Holding.
Retailers in Shanghai, Xuzhou and Qingdao have all been ordered by the authorities to pull Apple's tablets off their shelves, Reuters reported.
Shops in Beijing have already withdrawn their iPads from sale after a court ruled that Proview owned the trademark to the name "IPAD".
Although Chinese media reports suggest that government officials are enforcing the rulings, the Qingdao commerce department told Reuters it hadn't ordered any ban on iPad sales.
"Whether the retailers decide to stop sales or not is up to them. The government is not involved," a spokesman said.
Apple immediately launched an appeal against the IPAD trademark ruling so it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for shops to be dumping their iPad stock completely until that makes its way through the courts.
Monitor biz Proview, which wants damages from Apple over the trademark, has already admitted that China's customs officials told the firm it would be difficult to get an import and export ban on iPads in the country because of their popularity and the sheer number of them on the market.
For its part, Apple has said that it bought the trademark from Proview a number of years ago.
"We bought Proview's worldwide rights to the iPad trademark in 10 different countries several years ago. Proview refuses to honour their agreement with Apple in China and a Hong Kong court has sided with Apple in this matter," the company said. "Our case is still pending in mainland China." ®
COMMENTS
Meanwhile, back at the Samsung secret bunker...
It's pop-corn and drinks all-round.
Re: Can someone enlighten me?
I took it to mean that Proview only applied for and registered the rights in 10 countries. So their worldwide rights is equal to just 10 countries.
In the rest of the countries not including those 10, then Proview have no rights to the trademark and Apple was able to claim it without contention.
As a joke...
They should pay to re-brand all the iPads to be sold in China under the iProuVueSux label, or simply not sell them there. Also if you look at Proview's IPAD, it is really just an old CRT based iMac ripoff. So Proview named their iMac ripoff IPAD, and now are suing Apple for 2 billion dollars because Apple forgot that Taiwan wasn't part of China .
So we have traded innovation and creating for helping lawyers make money. Welcome to the year 2012, the year of the lawyer.
HK court's ruling seems quite damning against Proview
"The court said, in its findings, that Proview, its subsidiaries and at least one other company had combined together "with the common intention of injuring Apple," by breaching the agreement over the iPad name. The court, calling the event a conspiracy, further said Proview had "attempted to exploit the situation as a business opportunity," by asking for money."
the chinese courts' decision is correct imho because they bought the rights from Proview Taiwan not Proview China.
These are separate (but related) legal entities.
The taiwanese company is in charge of international stuff and the chinese company takes care of matters within the borders of China.
The taiwanese was the trademark administrator for international usage but the owner is the chinese company and that one never sold the mark. It was the taiwanese company that did it and they only sold the international rights not the rights within china as they had no right to sell that.
