Funny enough, iPhone was trademarked in Brazil way back in 2000. Last year a judge basically yanked that trademark away and gave it to Apple because Apple is "world renowned" and thus deserved it more. [1]
I guess trademark ownership is rather nebulous after all.
It sort of makes sense when you consider trademark law to largely be about protecting the consumer -- to prevent intentional deceptively similar names (or logos, trade dress, etc...) from causing the consumer to buy a product thinking it is another, or from a different company than it actually is.
It also has the effect of protecting the mark owning company from another company producing poor products which then become attributed to the original company. But arguably this also protects the consumer.
Basically it boils down to consumer confusion -- since there is this gigantic company that is world renowned, it will cause confusion if in Brazil the iPhone trademark is not assigned to Apple.
Like abhorrence, I don't think this is totally ridiculous. Compare the rules for seizing a domain name from squatters. If I manage to register mcdonalds.com, currently McDonald's, the gigantic fast food company, can just take it. Is that terrible?
Now, if I've been selling a product under the name "iPhone" for 13 years and I have to change the name because someone else in another country managed to release a competing product of the same name and become more famous than me... that's pretty harsh. Off the top of my head, two obvious approaches come to mind --
1. A "use it or lose it" regime, where the Brazilian guy with the iPhone trademark keeps it as long as he's actually doing business under it (it could well be that you can't maintain a trademark without using it anyway; I don't know much about trademark law).
2. The Brazilian iPhone guy should have been absurdly over-vigilant about potentially infringing marks, just like we all complain about major companies doing. He needed to keep Apple's iPhone out of Brazil entirely (or force them to change its name in the Brazilian market).
Also, following your link, two things jump out at me:
- Though the trademark was first requested in 2000, and it says the companies have been fighting over it for 6 years, it also says the Brazilian "iphone" went on sale last year. That looks a little more like bad faith.
- It looks like the judge didn't take the trademark away -- he said they'd have to share (not great, but not as bad as suddenly losing the name of your product).
