Patently Apple Strikes Again ⇥ patentlyapple.com

Jack Purcher of Patently Apple reports that Apple’s trademark application for the “iPad Mini” brand has been refused by the USPTO. There’s only a small problem with that: it isn’t actually true, according to Nilay Patel who tweeted:

To be clear, the USPTO has not denied Apple’s iPad mini tradmark yet — it’s flagged issues for Apple to correct.

Patel also retweeted this from Eric Adler:

@reckless taking care of the iPad mini office action should be ~3 hours of atty time. Or maybe 10 hours from a 2nd year associate.

Patel is a former attorney, though he doesn’t practice any more. Adler is a current IP attorney for Adler Vermillion & Skocilich. Jack Purcher isn’t.

As with most Patently Apple stuff, I expected this to disappear into the depths of the day’s news, never to be seen again. But, weirdly enough, it was picked up by the BBC, TechCrunch, the Atlantic Wire, and PC Magazine. Hell, Forbes ran it with a particularly stupid headline, “Apple Loses the iPad Mini Trademark”. Yes, Apple is now losing things it didn’t have in the first place.