Allow me to thow my 2 cents... (disclaimer: I'm a Brazilian)
...I have to side with "Adornoe" on almost every issue. First of all, he is right about calling out the evident anger against corporate America.
Second, let's get back to the real issue: trademark and exclusive rights. Should there be regulatory agencies that grant trademark rights and why so? I believe there should, for two reasons (1) To protect a company that spent (or is in the process of spending) millions and even billion of dollars to develop a product and promote it (together with its NAME). Trademarks should provide that company a degree of protection against opportunistic players that wants to hitch a ride on their hard labor. (2) Trademarks also protect the consumers! With trademarks, consumers are not faced with ambiguity because they know that such and such product is exclusively produced by such and such company and this protects them from being duped by opportunistic companies.
Let's look at Gradiente. Gradiente in the late 90s registered the name "Playstation" and then assigned the name to an ill fated line of entertainment PCs. According to an executive from Sony, this was one of the main reasons they decided not to introduce its video game console in the Brazilian market. And by the way, at the time, Gradiente was the sole company officially selling Nintendo game consoles in Brazil. In 2000, Gradiente registered the name Iphone. Granted, there was no iPhone from Apple at the time, but Gradiente did not introduce an Iphone line of product up until last year - conveniently one year before the statute of limitations for the trademark rights (granted only in 2008), 12 years after it applied for the trademark rights, many (many) years after moving out of the mobile phone market, five years after it was bought out of bankruptcy and five years after Apple launched its iPhone. So ask yourself if this is not an opportunistic move designed to take advantage of an already established brand. Ask yourself, would a serious company - one that believes on the merits of its product - launch a new product utilizing the same name of a previously established product?
And, here is where I disagree with Adornoe, he is wrong that the Brazilians would rip little benefit. They would actually be penalized because certainly there will be some poor souls (grandpa, grandma, uneducated poor people, etc.) out there that would evidently mistake the later phone with the fad product previously launched by Apple. Apple already designed 5 iPhones and sold millions of handsets, so ask yourself this, why would a company move back into this market after many years and utilize the "iphone" name if not to dupe consumers?
On a side note, lets also analyze Apple. To their merit, they design innovative products and are always pushing the envelope. But they didn't to it all alone. Many of the technology was developed by others. So, Apple has also been opportunistic at times. And like Gradiente, they try to claim ownership to things that has little or no merit (such as patenting icons with rounded corners). Apple is even more opportunistic when they require that they get a large cut of the revenue of every music, app, book, magazine and newspaper sold for its devices. Where is the merit in that? Little or no merit, except for the fact that they control the channels through which these soft products are sold. (One can't install an app without going through the iTunes store).
Getting back on track, Apple's opportunistic attitudes elsewhere doesn't change the reality that they themselves deserve all the credit for the fact that the iPhone name is recognized throughout the globe (and in Brazil) and that they did that long before Gradient gave some serious thought on actually utilizing the name for the product it launched in 2012. The ruling certainly does not benefit the Brazilian government, there is probably a higher demand for Apple iPhones and the local government already imposes hefty taxes on consumer products. The ruling certainly does not benefit Brazilian consumers because some might mistake one product for the other. Lastly, and most importantly, the ruling does not reward MERITOCRACY.
