John

Article 3

Despite being one of Apple’s biggest markets, it seems Apple has found itself in a nasty lawsuit. A Hong-Kong-based company has filed an injunction to restrict Apple from selling iPads in China for 38 million dollar damage, because it claims they have filed trademark Ipad back in 2000. "We have to admit that Apple's iPad is a great product, and Apple creates great value out of that," said Yang Rongshan, the chairman of the Proview arm in city of Shenzhen. The challenge follows one by Apple against Proview, which claims it owns the iPad name in mainland China. In December, a Shenzhen court rejected Apple's challenge. Apple has appealed to a higher court, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency. Proview Technology is part of Proview International Holdings Ltd., a contract manufacturer of liquid-crystal displays in Hong Kong, it first registered the iPad name in 2001.The company is now suing Apple for 1.6 billion dollar. The spokesperson for Apple has declined to comment.

Intellectual property is one of the biggest issue affecting China-US relationships, since we are losing a lot of money from software copyrights in China. It’s kind of ironic now that now a Chinese company is suing an American icon industry for copyrights. Still I think this is a minor issue compared to our software intellectual property rights being abused in China. I think this issue needs to be solved quickly because it will add more strains into US-China trade relationships. We need a healthy trade relationship with China if we want our economy to recover.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/02/07/apple-faces-16-billion-lawsuit-over-ipad-name/