Do Apple Trademarks Reveal What It's About To Launch?

from the foiled-by-trademarks dept

If you're a gadget watcher or an Apple fanatic, then you already know that tomorrow is Apple's big fall event when it announces new hardware products. Unlike basically every other tech blog in the world, we tend not to cover the announcements (or all of the rumors leading up to those announcements). Every so often something interesting will come out of them and we'll write up that, but for the most part, we recognize that other sites are going to cover the basic beats and we're not the kind of publication that wants to spend our time writing up promotional copy for tech companies. But, sometimes there's some overlap in our usual coverage and these kinds of events. Brian Conroy, a trademark lawyer in Ireland who has a fun blog of trademark-related issues realized that Apple may have leaked some details via its trademark applications.

For example, while there are rumors of three new iPhones, Conroy notes that Apple has only applied for two trademarks related to the iPhone 7: "iPhone 7" and "iPhone 7 Plus." That doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't a third option, but the trademark applications seem to suggest only two. Conroy has also dug deep into global trademark filings to basically prove that Apple is the company behind the trademark filing for "Airpods" which many expect to be the name of the new earbuds or something similar that Apple may announce. The trademark itself was noticed a long time ago, filed for a company named "Entertainment in Flight LLC," presumed to be a dummy corporation set up by Apple. But Conroy goes further and shows that Apple may have slipped up in hiding some of this, and that the same Airpods trademark filing in countries like Norway, Malaysia and India came directly from Apple -- and the one in Malaysia points back to the original Entertainment in Flight filing in the US -- more or less proving that Entertainment in Flight is really Apple. Here's Conroy's video explaining this: Trademark law: finally useful for something.

Filed Under: airpods, brian conroy, iphone, trademark
Companies: apple