First, a hat tip to IP Dragon, who is tearing up the blogosphere with great posts recently. I made the mistake, unfortunately, of following a link to a Xinhua news story on the recent Apple trademark win. Before I bitch about it, here’s the entire text of the article to set up my gripes:

U.S. electronic manufacturer, Apple Inc., won a trademark infringement lawsuit against an electronics company based in south China’s Shenzhen City.

According to the Intermediate People’s Court in Shenyang, the capital of the Liaoning Province, New Apple Concept Digital Technology Co., Ltd., was ordered on Tuesday to pay 400,000 yuan (58,000 U.S. dollars) for infringing on Apple’s trademark and logo.

Apple Inc. registered the trademark "APPLE" and the apple logo when it entered China’s market in 1993. It has exclusive trademark rights till 2013.

New Apple Concept Digital Technology Co., Ltd., established in Shenzhen in 2005, used the pattern of an apple with two wings as its logo. The court said it looked similar to Apple’s logo. It put the pattern on its products, wrappings and Website.

In 2006, Apple Inc. told the New Apple Concept company to stop infringing on its trademark.

In April of this year, the New Apple Concept company was sued.

The court ordered the Shenzhen company "to stop infringement practices" and pay damages to Apple Inc.

This is really awful stuff. First we learn that Apple Inc. registered their mark in the PRC in 1993 and that it has exclusive rights until 2013. We already know that this reporter knows absolutely nothing about trademark, although to his credit, at least he did not refer to the rights in question as patents or copyrights (small victory there, I suppose).

What’s the problem? Apple Inc. registered their mark in 1993. This tells us almost nothing. To be informative, this sentence must tell us in which Classes the mark was registered in, specifying which goods/services. This is how a trademark is protected — this is one of the first bits of info you need to begin a discussion about possible infringement. (There is an exception to this involving famous trademarks, but I’ll address that later.)

Apple Inc. has "exclusive" rights until 2013. Again, this is a rather silly statement. Any trademark that is registered carries with it exclusive rights of some sort — saying so just points out further lack of understanding. What about the date? Also fairly meaningless. Expiration dates are very important for patents and copyrights, as once you hit that wall, your rights will terminate. With trademarks, once you reach the end of the current ten-year period, you just pay the fee and get another ten years (no limits on this). The fact that they have rights until 2013 is meaningless.

Moving on. The infringer’s mark was found to be similar to the one registered by Apple Inc. (finally, a relevant fact). The infringer used the mark "on its products, wrappings and Website". Not sure what "wrappings" is a translation of (maybe packaging), but again, this tells us very little, since we still don’t know under which Class Apple Inc. registered its mark.

The article gives us 20% of the needed facts here. To be fair, that’s probably about all that was publicized. What really happened in the case? One of two things probably. Either this was a straightforward trademark infringement, whereby the infringer used a similar mark on goods/services that overlapped Apple Inc.’s scope of protection, or the goods/services in question did not overlap and Apple Inc. had to use a famous trademark argument to persuade the court that it was worthy of an expanded scope of protection.

It would be interesting to know some of these details, but you can’t always get what you want. I don’t fault Xinhua for not being able to get these facts, but writing an entire article based on nothing is pretty weak stuff. Why bother?

Similarly, why bother writing an entire blog post in response to an article written about nothing? Sounds like a problem for me, but wait, in fact I am following traditional blog rules, which are summarized quite cogently here.