7 ms·

Here's the brief - There's a telecom company by the name "iFone" in Mexico. And Apple sued them unnecessarily...and lost the case. "The iFone trademark was fil

by neya 14y ago

Here's the brief - There's a telecom company by the name "iFone" in Mexico. And Apple sued them unnecessarily...and lost the case. "The iFone trademark was filed in Mexico in 2003, a full four years before Apple filed to trademark the iPhone. Despite the rather obvious priority issue, Apple decided to sue iFone in 2009 in an attempt to invalidate the company’s name for being too similar to the iPhone. The predictable response was a countersuit by iFone, and the court battles have been swinging in iFone’s favor ever since." I think Apple deserves this and perhaps, even more.

markokocic 14y ago
However, this is a win-win situation for lawyers, at both Apple and iFone.
- DannyBee 14y ago
  Err, what? They are salaried. It's a "win" for iFone's outside counsel, and a blow for Apple's. It's barely a win at all, most likely. Yes, they get paid, but companies move legal business around all the time depending on wins/losses and quality of advice (and how that advice fared in court). I'm always a bit boggled at why folks think stuff like this is a "win" for lawyers, just because some lawyer makes money. Dealing with these kinds of cases with clients like Apple is like running 2 startups at once. You are working 14+ hour days for a year, dealing with tons of emergencies, researching 100 page briefs as fast as you can, etc. This is not the win. The real "win" is apple paying you 1k/hr hour to do relatively simple stuff because you won this case. If you lose, well, it's "what have you done for me lately". Hell, if you lose, Apple would probably demand an hourly rate reduction if you want to keep their business.
  - malandrew 14y ago
    It's a win in the sense that you will always take home big bucks. Yes, it's a lot of work, but there isn't a risk of no payout in the case your side loses. Startup success or failure means big bucks or no bucks. Lawsuit success or failure means big bucks or even bigger bucks.
    - benmanns 14y ago
      So you're an employee of a company, and the company goes bankrupt in part because you're not doing your job properly (and the lawyers were probably doing their job properly - they just incorrectly predicted the outcome of the case, or an executive pushed it through anyways), but you still got paid your salary. That's a huge win right? Lawyers (good ones) want to provide value for their clients/employers as much as a (good) developer does.
    - TheCapn 14y ago
      Its more of just a fallacy for those who dislike the law game. People shout out "only the lawyers win" type line when its pointless lawsuits going back and forth and is only ever true in cases where the lawyers are hired on a per-case basis, like divorce struggles. In corporate legal warfare, such as this, the lawyers are just doing their assigned duties. To win or lose probably doesn't mean a bonus usually.
      - jiggy2011 14y ago
        True, but things like this going on at least allows the lawyers to justify their salary. The more important this stuff is, the higher that salary if likely to be.
        rayiner 14y ago
        "This stuff" = people fighting with each other. At the end of the day, that's what it comes down to. E.g. Apple didn't sue Samsung because of some arcane patents. They sued Samsung because Samsung released very similar designs to theirs, and they felt ripped off. If the patents weren't there, they would have sued on some other basis. What ultimately allows lawyers to justify their salary is conflict, and in a big complex economy lawyers don't really need to game the law to manufacture that conflict. Indeed, people come to the US from all over the world to hash out their conflicts in American courtrooms.
    - DannyBee 14y ago
      No offense, but I think you are greatly confused about the economics of lawyering. Without getting into a full blown 30 page explanation, you do not always take home big bucks. This is a common misconception. There is in fact, a large risk of "no payout", or worse, a loss, if apple decides to argue about your billing (which they will). As a firm, you may end up having to pay your associates more than apple pays you, depending on how things go, generating a net loss for the firm. Your associates get paid well (particularly in the IP field), but usually this just about makes up for the large amount of law school debt they have (which can easily be $3000+ a month). Again not that they are poor starving people, but the salary differences you see often are eaten by debt payments and the fact that they work ridiculous hours. On the direct "payout side", you are right that trademark work is not usually contingency work, but a lot of other work is, in which case the risk is immense. Firms are often fronting many millions of dollars in large cases, and all you have is the hope you will get paid on time. Your recourse if you don't is to sue the client, and then spend even more money, and either settle for 50% to not drag it out (the average time to resolve these cases is 7 years), or hope a judge doesn't think your billing is atrocious. This risk is certainly less in the corporate world (in my wife's area, family law, individual clients can have something like a 35% non-payment rate, particularly in hard economies), but still there. Again, i'm not saying lawyers don't make money, and aren't well off in a lot of cases, but to pretend that lawyers are somehow guaranteed "big bucks" in cases like this is just a fantasy. It's a business. Sometimes you do well, sometimes you don't. There are no guarantees, and there is always risk. Given the state of the legal job market and the legal world , if you want to make big bucks, running a law firm and taking cases like this is not the way to do it anymore.
  - markokocic 14y ago
    Yes, lawyers are salaried, but having this ridiculous court battles just increases the number of lawyers needed, thus increasing their average salary. Look, I would like the judge ordered them to do some custom phone application development instead of citing legal documents. That way, they will need to hire more developers to do that, or allocate some developers from other departments, thus creating more developer jobs. Instead, the lawyers got to fight that battle and get paid for that, thus, they won.
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      I think this is a great insight. A lawyer's action can benefit or harm himself; it is fairly trivial to determine which in any particular case. However a lawyers actions can also benefit or harm lawyers as a group. A single lawyer initiating and losing lots of lawsuits is not really going to benefit himself, but he is doing his part to drive demand for lawyers even higher. If lawyers were microbes, we could expect to see this sort of behavior become more prevalent so long as it provided a benefit to lawyers with similar traits greater than the damage done to the individual lawyer.
    - rayiner 14y ago
      > Yes, lawyers are salaried, but having this ridiculous court battles just increases the number of lawyers needed, thus increasing their average salary. How is this an example of a "ridiculous court battle?" We have trade-marks so businesses can build a brand and keep people from free-riding on their good-will. Trademarks are fairly arbitrary and not intrinsically valuable, so the only real consideration at play is that people use different ones, to minimize confusion. "iFone" and "iPhone" are confusingly similar. Somehow, you have to decide who gets to use the mark in Mexico.
      - markokocic 14y ago
        IMHO, this _is_ an example of ridiculous court battle. AFAIU Apple is trying for years to destroy iFone trademark in Mexico, although any non-salaried lawyer would just say it's a lost battle. And battling lost battles over and over with 0.1% of a chance to win for years just out of hope that, by same miracle or mistake, they could win the case is ridiculous. I'd rather them spend their money on innovation, but that's just my opinion, and the money they spend on lawyers is just their money :)
periferral 14y ago
Couldn't agree more. Apple tried to throw its weight around when it clearly had no business suing. Apple's working on the principle it is too big to fail.
Nux 14y ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X378x8Cyqhw#t=32s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X378x8Cyqhw#t=32s !!!!!!!! :-))
ChuckMcM 14y ago
Great quote from the lobby of the San Jose superior court lobby, "Lawsuits are like handguns, when you pull the trigger someone is going to get hurt but its not clear who." I don't know if the lawyer was trying to dissuade a client or just kibitzing with another lawyer but it was a great comment.
- baddox 14y ago
  What am I missing about that quote? If you're wielding a handgun, it's pretty clear who will get hurt when you pull the trigger, barring rare events like a misfire or a ricochet.
  - cfinke 14y ago
    The lawyers for Apple were holding the gun, pointing it in the general direction of both iFone and Apple.
  - CountHackulus 14y ago
    So you pull the trigger and kill someone. You get put away for murder for life. It's more about the unintended consequences of a lawsuit than outright direct effects.
  - eyeface 14y ago
    You pull the trigger, maybe you miss (Apple not winning the lawsuit), then they pull their gun...
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    You'd be surprised how many people with handguns shoot themselves in the process of trying to intimidate someone else.
  - bane 14y ago
    People sometimes shoot back.
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    What I took away from the quote wash that in personal disputes between individuals, when one individual pulls out a handgun it escalates the dispute to the level of potentially mortal harm. Prior to that level of escalation there could be a knock down drag out fight but it would be perhaps less likely to result in someone dying. Further, when the stakes become 'life or death' because someone has a gun, the responses take on a level of urgency and desperation that they would not have at lower threat levels. So from the perspective of an analogy, corporations don't have 'blood' they have money, which is an analog for blood. And up to the point where they are arguing about this and that the total amount of money that is at stake is constrained by the companies involved deciding not to do business with each other. But a lawsuit can drain a disproportionate amount of money out of the 'target' (and the instigator). This 'escalates' the problem because what is at risk is higher. And, like an individual, when you threaten a company with more serious damage, their willingness to respond with more harm goes up significantly, if they feel like they are fighting for their life they will do things that normally would be considered 'too risky.' So as an analog, the handgun and a lawsuit are escalation to the conflict which can result in much greater harm.

by neya 14y ago

markokocic 14y ago

However, this is a win-win situation for lawyers, at both Apple and iFone.

DannyBee 14y ago
Err, what? They are salaried. It's a "win" for iFone's outside counsel, and a blow for Apple's. It's barely a win at all, most likely. Yes, they get paid, but companies move legal business around all the time depending on wins/losses and quality of advice (and how that advice fared in court). I'm always a bit boggled at why folks think stuff like this is a "win" for lawyers, just because some lawyer makes money. Dealing with these kinds of cases with clients like Apple is like running 2 startups at once. You are working 14+ hour days for a year, dealing with tons of emergencies, researching 100 page briefs as fast as you can, etc. This is not the win. The real "win" is apple paying you 1k/hr hour to do relatively simple stuff because you won this case. If you lose, well, it's "what have you done for me lately". Hell, if you lose, Apple would probably demand an hourly rate reduction if you want to keep their business.
- malandrew 14y ago
  It's a win in the sense that you will always take home big bucks. Yes, it's a lot of work, but there isn't a risk of no payout in the case your side loses. Startup success or failure means big bucks or no bucks. Lawsuit success or failure means big bucks or even bigger bucks.
  - benmanns 14y ago
    So you're an employee of a company, and the company goes bankrupt in part because you're not doing your job properly (and the lawyers were probably doing their job properly - they just incorrectly predicted the outcome of the case, or an executive pushed it through anyways), but you still got paid your salary. That's a huge win right? Lawyers (good ones) want to provide value for their clients/employers as much as a (good) developer does.
  - TheCapn 14y ago
    Its more of just a fallacy for those who dislike the law game. People shout out "only the lawyers win" type line when its pointless lawsuits going back and forth and is only ever true in cases where the lawyers are hired on a per-case basis, like divorce struggles. In corporate legal warfare, such as this, the lawyers are just doing their assigned duties. To win or lose probably doesn't mean a bonus usually.
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      True, but things like this going on at least allows the lawyers to justify their salary. The more important this stuff is, the higher that salary if likely to be.
      - rayiner 14y ago
        "This stuff" = people fighting with each other. At the end of the day, that's what it comes down to. E.g. Apple didn't sue Samsung because of some arcane patents. They sued Samsung because Samsung released very similar designs to theirs, and they felt ripped off. If the patents weren't there, they would have sued on some other basis. What ultimately allows lawyers to justify their salary is conflict, and in a big complex economy lawyers don't really need to game the law to manufacture that conflict. Indeed, people come to the US from all over the world to hash out their conflicts in American courtrooms.
  - DannyBee 14y ago
    No offense, but I think you are greatly confused about the economics of lawyering. Without getting into a full blown 30 page explanation, you do not always take home big bucks. This is a common misconception. There is in fact, a large risk of "no payout", or worse, a loss, if apple decides to argue about your billing (which they will). As a firm, you may end up having to pay your associates more than apple pays you, depending on how things go, generating a net loss for the firm. Your associates get paid well (particularly in the IP field), but usually this just about makes up for the large amount of law school debt they have (which can easily be $3000+ a month). Again not that they are poor starving people, but the salary differences you see often are eaten by debt payments and the fact that they work ridiculous hours. On the direct "payout side", you are right that trademark work is not usually contingency work, but a lot of other work is, in which case the risk is immense. Firms are often fronting many millions of dollars in large cases, and all you have is the hope you will get paid on time. Your recourse if you don't is to sue the client, and then spend even more money, and either settle for 50% to not drag it out (the average time to resolve these cases is 7 years), or hope a judge doesn't think your billing is atrocious. This risk is certainly less in the corporate world (in my wife's area, family law, individual clients can have something like a 35% non-payment rate, particularly in hard economies), but still there. Again, i'm not saying lawyers don't make money, and aren't well off in a lot of cases, but to pretend that lawyers are somehow guaranteed "big bucks" in cases like this is just a fantasy. It's a business. Sometimes you do well, sometimes you don't. There are no guarantees, and there is always risk. Given the state of the legal job market and the legal world , if you want to make big bucks, running a law firm and taking cases like this is not the way to do it anymore.
- markokocic 14y ago
  Yes, lawyers are salaried, but having this ridiculous court battles just increases the number of lawyers needed, thus increasing their average salary. Look, I would like the judge ordered them to do some custom phone application development instead of citing legal documents. That way, they will need to hire more developers to do that, or allocate some developers from other departments, thus creating more developer jobs. Instead, the lawyers got to fight that battle and get paid for that, thus, they won.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    I think this is a great insight. A lawyer's action can benefit or harm himself; it is fairly trivial to determine which in any particular case. However a lawyers actions can also benefit or harm lawyers as a group. A single lawyer initiating and losing lots of lawsuits is not really going to benefit himself, but he is doing his part to drive demand for lawyers even higher. If lawyers were microbes, we could expect to see this sort of behavior become more prevalent so long as it provided a benefit to lawyers with similar traits greater than the damage done to the individual lawyer.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    > Yes, lawyers are salaried, but having this ridiculous court battles just increases the number of lawyers needed, thus increasing their average salary. How is this an example of a "ridiculous court battle?" We have trade-marks so businesses can build a brand and keep people from free-riding on their good-will. Trademarks are fairly arbitrary and not intrinsically valuable, so the only real consideration at play is that people use different ones, to minimize confusion. "iFone" and "iPhone" are confusingly similar. Somehow, you have to decide who gets to use the mark in Mexico.
    - markokocic 14y ago
      IMHO, this _is_ an example of ridiculous court battle. AFAIU Apple is trying for years to destroy iFone trademark in Mexico, although any non-salaried lawyer would just say it's a lost battle. And battling lost battles over and over with 0.1% of a chance to win for years just out of hope that, by same miracle or mistake, they could win the case is ridiculous. I'd rather them spend their money on innovation, but that's just my opinion, and the money they spend on lawyers is just their money :)

periferral 14y ago

Couldn't agree more. Apple tried to throw its weight around when it clearly had no business suing. Apple's working on the principle it is too big to fail.

Nux 14y ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X378x8Cyqhw#t=32s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X378x8Cyqhw#t=32s !!!!!!!! :-))

ChuckMcM 14y ago

Great quote from the lobby of the San Jose superior court lobby, "Lawsuits are like handguns, when you pull the trigger someone is going to get hurt but its not clear who." I don't know if the lawyer was trying to dissuade a client or just kibitzing with another lawyer but it was a great comment.

baddox 14y ago
What am I missing about that quote? If you're wielding a handgun, it's pretty clear who will get hurt when you pull the trigger, barring rare events like a misfire or a ricochet.
- cfinke 14y ago
  The lawyers for Apple were holding the gun, pointing it in the general direction of both iFone and Apple.
- CountHackulus 14y ago
  So you pull the trigger and kill someone. You get put away for murder for life. It's more about the unintended consequences of a lawsuit than outright direct effects.
- eyeface 14y ago
  You pull the trigger, maybe you miss (Apple not winning the lawsuit), then they pull their gun...
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  You'd be surprised how many people with handguns shoot themselves in the process of trying to intimidate someone else.
- bane 14y ago
  People sometimes shoot back.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  What I took away from the quote wash that in personal disputes between individuals, when one individual pulls out a handgun it escalates the dispute to the level of potentially mortal harm. Prior to that level of escalation there could be a knock down drag out fight but it would be perhaps less likely to result in someone dying. Further, when the stakes become 'life or death' because someone has a gun, the responses take on a level of urgency and desperation that they would not have at lower threat levels. So from the perspective of an analogy, corporations don't have 'blood' they have money, which is an analog for blood. And up to the point where they are arguing about this and that the total amount of money that is at stake is constrained by the companies involved deciding not to do business with each other. But a lawsuit can drain a disproportionate amount of money out of the 'target' (and the instigator). This 'escalates' the problem because what is at risk is higher. And, like an individual, when you threaten a company with more serious damage, their willingness to respond with more harm goes up significantly, if they feel like they are fighting for their life they will do things that normally would be considered 'too risky.' So as an analog, the handgun and a lawsuit are escalation to the conflict which can result in much greater harm.