Source: China Law Blog
Just read a Bloomberg News article, ?Proview Using ?IPad? Name is Harmful: Apple,? that quotes me on the Apple-Proview dispute, as follows:
?It?s not really trademark law, it?s about whether the trademark was legally transferred or not,? Dan Harris, a Seattle-based lawyer with Harris & Moure who handles cases on intellectual property in China, said before the hearing. ?Proview Taiwan agreed to sign over the trademark, but Proview Taiwan didn?t own the trademark.?
I see the case as being about authority. Authority to sell the iPad trademark. Who had the authority to sell the iPad trademark to Apple back when Apple (acting through a third party intermediary) thought it purchased the trademark for iPad in China back in 2009?? Let me explain.
If you bought the Brooklyn Bridge from me, you would not own it. Why not? Because I cannot transfer title in the Brooklyn Bridge to anyone because I do not own it in the first place. This analysis should be the starting point for analyzing the Apple-Proview case. I say this because it appears that Apple bought the iPad China trademark from a company that did not own it. Apple (again, acting through a third party intermediary) bought the iPad China trademark from a Taiwanese company called Proview Electronics Company, Ltd. (?Proview-Taiwan?) at a time when a Shenzhen company called Proview Technology Shenzhen Co, Ltd. (?Proview-Shenzhen?) actually owned it.
So the big legal issue in China is not really a trademark issue, it is an ownership and authority issue. The ownership of the trademark when it was allegedly sold is not really in doubt; it was owned by Proview-Shenzhen. The real question is whether Proview-Shenzhen authorized Proview-Taiwan to sell the iPad trademark to Apple and that is mostly what is being argued in the Chinese courts.
To modify the Brooklyn Bridge analogy, let?s say that you bought a house from Mr. Jones and it turned out that Mr. Jones did not own the house, but rather, his wife, Mrs. Jones, owned the house. If Mr. Jones and Mrs. Jones were in the midst of a divorce and she had told him not to sell the house and had told you that she owned the house and so Mr. Jones could not sell it to you, your claim to own the house through the purchase would probably be pretty weak. But let us suppose that Mr. and Mrs. Jones were happily married and Mrs. Jones was right there during the negotiations for the sale of the house and never said a word about how she was the one who actually owned it. Well your claim to own the house would be a lot stronger.
The Apple-Proview case is dealing with similar factual issues, as can be seen in the Bloomberg article. In other words, it looks like a factual mess.
And that is not the only factual mess. Remember how I keep saying Apple used a third party intermediary to try to buy the China iPad trademark. Well, Proview-Taiwan is suing Apple in the United States about that, claiming that the way Apple sought to buy the iPad name constituted fraud and unfair competition. My initial reaction upon hearing of this lawsuit was to assume it had little validity. I assumed this because it is quite common for big companies (small ones too) to try to buy something through a third party intermediary so as to avoid revealing to the seller how much the desired item may really be worth and I had never heard of a lawsuit being brought over that.? But in reading, ?How Apple snookered Proview to get the iPad trademark,? I am not prepared to just laugh off that lawsuit.??
So what should your takeaway be from the Apple-Proview case? Nothing more than that you need to be sure that the company with whom you sign a contract is the right company. I know this sounds basic, but this sort of thing happens more than you can imagine in international deals.? I personally have worked on at least two joint venture deals gone bad where the American company had signed an agreement involving the wrong party. In both cases, the American company thought it had a deal to be the distributer of the Joint Venture?s products outside China, but in fact, the agreement actually said that the American company would be the distributer for its Chinese joint venture partners? products. And since the Chinese partner did make products that the American wanted to distribute?.
For more on the Apple-Proview case, check out ?Apple v. Proview. China Trademarks And So Much To Learn? and if you want still more, go over to China Hearsay, where Stan Abrams has written nearly a dozen posts on this case. And for you law-geeks out there, click here for a copy of the just-filed Amended Complaint (along with some interesting exhibits) in Proview?s U.S. litigation against Apple.?
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