Nice article, but unless I'm going cross-eyed I didn't see anything on the abandonment of registered marks. I've read another article recently that indicates marks are only good for a few years unless you continuously have a product bearing that mark for sale.

When Linksys originally brought the "iPhone" to market, it wasn't called "iPhone" at all, it was "CIT" and some model number, if I recall. If you read the documentation for these products they don't mentioned iPhone at all and it's only been recently that Cisco changed the packaging and the website to reflect "iPhone", apparently after their mark had expired.

Now I'm dubious about the quality of any information that I find out the Internet, but it seems that everyone is just assuming that Cisco is right when they say the product was an "iPhone" all along and no one is really bothering to go back and check to see whether it actually was.

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