Filed under: Apple Corporate, Apple
Apple sued by maker of iPod knockoffs
Taiwanese Luxpro Corp is suing Apple for a cool 100 million dollars. Luxpro, which was sued by Apple back in 2005 for making the Tangent line of iPod knock-offs, is now suing Apple after a Taiwanese court's ruling on behalf of Apple was overturned. Following all this? Luxpro created the Tangent, a cheap iPod ripoff. Apple sued Luxpro. Apple won. Luxpro appealed. Luxpro won on appeal. Luxpro is now suing Apple. They say they want to be paid for their losses during the time that the injunction held. Apparently, the Tangent may not even be all that bad of a music player. The Make Blog gave it a pretty good review even though an iPodlounge review hated it. It plays MP3 and WMA and has a FM tuner. It's practically a Zune!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Will Angel said 2:33PM on 1-05-2007
For what it's worth, I bought a Tangent (hey, it was $10 - I figured I could just leave it in the car in case my iPod died on a long trip). It's awful. My favorite feature is how the volume controls stop working after five minutes of play time. Fortunately, were I to subject myself to it, the battery dies after four hours anyway.
Maybe it's just a bad unit - lordy knows I had to go through four 80gb iPods before I got one that didn't have anything wrong with it out of the box - however, I trust Apple to at least do an exchange right, even if the Apple Store's dumb system makes it take 30 minutes a pop. I trust Luxpro to take my money, and maybe laugh at me as they run away. I'd love to know how they won an appeal against Apple.
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derek said 2:38PM on 1-05-2007
So they are suing them for what exactly?
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Billy K said 2:57PM on 1-05-2007
"It's practically a Zune!"
My first laugh of the day!
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Liquidmark said 4:51PM on 1-05-2007
LOL
God, this is funny! They can't be serious!
I don't know how things work in Taiwan, but this is retarded. They lost their case, fair and square. Getting an appeal through doesn't change that.
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westbay said 6:11PM on 1-05-2007
Why is this a 'knockoff', and a Sansa (apparently)isn't? Or will Apple sue them, too? More to the point, can Apple hope to prevent anybody else from making small, rectangular objects with rounded corners?
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Word Diggity said 6:52PM on 1-08-2007
"Why is this a 'knockoff', and a Sansa (apparently)isn't?"
Because you could set a Sansa next to a Nano and tell the difference, but the Tangent looks EXACTLY like a Shuffle.
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Sydney T said 8:59PM on 1-05-2007
Hi TUAW,
i just read from a chinese mac news, which has a very good reputation for their fairness of news.
From frostyplace.com
The lawsuit for Apple vs luxpro is not finished at all; the court only disagreed to Luxpro to paid Apple from their cloning product. Since the product was pulled before it can hit to shelf. (In Taiwan, not sure in other countries)
In addition, the court agreed Luxpro's copyright infringement. Especially, when Luxpro was showing their clones in an expo in Germany last year.
A very funny quote from Luxpro CEO:
"Although our's shuffle really look like apple's, but we made it from ourselves..., Does 'lookalike' is illegal too?"
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