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The Apple v Cisco battle isn’t over yet.

Both companies have agreed to extend talks aimed at “reaching agreement on trademark rights and interoperability”.

Apple launched it’s iPhone last month in San Francisco and immediately Cisco sued Apple for trademark infringement of its own line of internet-enabled iPhones.

Cisco makes much of the hardware that underpins the internet, and has owned the trademark on the iPhone name since 2000 after it acquired another company Infogear.

However some believe their hold on it isn’t that strong due to the amount of time they held the trademark and how they only used it moments before Apple launched its version of an existing line products.

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I read this late last night on theregister.co.uk

Apple appears unable to “think different” on the cell phone front. First the computer maker nicked the iPhone name for the actual device from Cisco, and now we find it’s grabbed an application name from poor old Citrix.

Earlier this week, Apple bragged about teaming with Cingular on its Visual Voicemail software that runs on the iPhone. The voicemail application displays caller information and allows users to pick the order in which messages are played back instead of forcing you to hear messages in a sequential order.

Such features won’t impress Citrix, which has been selling Visual Voicemail software since it acquired Net6 in 2004. [Thanks, Jason.]

“Visual Voicemail enables Call Pilot voicemail users to have a visual indication of the number of voice mail messages in the mailbox, the senders of these voice mail messages, the time of the voice mail message, and the length of the voice mails,” Citrix notes on its website. “Visual Voicemail enables users to take a quick glance at their list of voice mail messages to check for important ones – without having to listen to all their messages.”

Apple have taken 2 years to come up with a lot of stuff done by others and just pulled it all together – hardly something worth shouting about as much as Jobs has been doing.

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Well we all thought this had been settled but it appears not? -

From the BBC

Cisco Systems is suing Apple Computer for trademark infringement in a US federal court, for using the iPhone name. …

Apple responded by saying the lawsuit was “silly” and that Cisco’s trademark registration was “tenuous at best”.

“We think Cisco’s trademark lawsuit is silly,” Apple spokesman Alan Hely said. “There are already several companies using the name iPhone for Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) products.”

I have an inkling as to who will win this one, but as great as the Apple phone is, part of me doesn’t like the way they seem to railroad people, throwing money and lawyers at things to make them disappear or get what they want. But then if they have the money why not?

I guess we see Cisco as the underdogs and that would help them gain support, which always makes for a good fight, but looking at the details Cisco do seem to have a strong case. It has owned? the? registered name? since 2000 when it bought Infogear Technology who had the name previously for several years.

I’d like to see Apple wriggle their way out of this one.

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