As long as it was fully charged,
it probably could boil noodles if dropped into the pan.
Steely-eyed industrial gumshoes in the east-central Chinese city of Wuhan have foiled a nefarious plan by dishonorable appliance punters to exploit the power of the Apple brand. In the Qiaokou district of that riverside city of 10 million souls, a firm dishonestly identifying themselves as "Apple Limited" had – without legal …
.here I was hoping China would turn out to be the last best hope of freedom from the tyranny of intellectual property rapidly descending about this benighted planet, even to the point of my being prepared to sacrifice freedom of speech in exchange for freedom from patents, but no, they seem to be falling into the same IP trap as the west. What a shame.
Nothing wrong with protecting your trademark IP and branding.
Without protection for branding and trademarks it becomes very hard to buy the genuine item as it allows the counterfeiters and cloners to dump all manner of fake rubbish on the market.
If you've ever bought anything from China and spent an hour trying to find out who the hell made it (to find drivers or updates) then you'll be glad we take trademarks seriously.
Your freedom of speech does not preclude my right to protect my small business from clones who could drive me into the ground by dint of bigger marketing budgets. And "freedom of speech" in any case does not allow you to appropriate any. Creation of anyone else and claim it as your own - eg, it would be easy to rip El Reg's content wholesale, or he'll, just start another el Register and claim to be the real one.
The irony is that a free-for-all in IP and trademark, as you suggest, would benefit large companies at the expense of small ones almost exclusively.
Think beyond the first example you see before you make yourself look like an idiot.
Sounds like the govt/police have come under some pressure to crackdown on the copyright infringements so someone said
"Quick, take these apple iphone stickers and go out and stick them on something, then make a big show of the polioce raid. Oh , and if its some crap we couldnt sell anyway, all the better"
I am currently studying in China and you would be amazed by the amount of products that use Apple's logo. Gas burner? Yeah sure. Do you want a pink wallet and a eye-popping fuchsia sweater both with the logo to go with that? Just go along any bigger street and you'll find it.
Seriously, it is so common that I stopped noticing it - Chinese are crazy about Apple! And I mean crazy-crazy!
Using the Apple logo is obviously not legal, but as far as i know Apple only trademarked the term "iPhone" only in conjunction with "mobile phones, digital audio player, electronic data-transmitting device, handheld unit for playing electronic games" ... so any company that wants could apply for the iPhone trademark for a gas stove ?!