Intellectual property

Apple has filed more than 200 patent applications related to the technology behind the iPhone

LG Electronics claimed the design of the iPhone was copied from the LG Prada. Woo-Young Kwak, head of LG Mobile Handset R&D Center, said at a press conference: "we consider that Apple copied Prada phone after the design was unveiled when it was presented in the iF Design Award and won the prize in September 2006."

On September 3, 1993, Infogear filed for the U.S. trademark "I PHONE" and on March 20, 1996 applied for the trademark "IPhone". "I Phone" was registered in March 1998,and "IPhone" was registered in 1999. Since then, the I PHONE mark had been abandoned. Infogear trademarks cover "communications terminals comprising computer hardware and software providing integrated telephone, data communications and personal computer functions" (1993 filing),and "computer hardware and software for providing integrated telephone communication with computerized global information networks" (1996 filing).

Infogear released a telephone with an integrated web browser under the name iPhone in 1998.In 2000, Infogear won an infringement claim against the owners of the iphones.com domain name. In June 2000, Cisco Systems acquired Infogear, including the iPhone trademark.[204] On December 18, 2006, they released a range of re-branded Voice over IP (VoIP) sets under the name iPhone.

In October 2002, Apple applied for the "iPhone" trademark in the United Kingdom, Australia, Singapore, and the European Union. A Canadian application followed in October 2004, and a New Zealand application in September 2006. As of October 2006, only the Singapore and Australian applications had been granted. In September 2006, a company called Ocean Telecom Services applied for an "iPhone" trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and Hong Kong, following a filing in Trinidad and Tobago.

As the Ocean Telecom trademark applications use exactly the same wording as the New Zealand application of Apple, it is assumed that Ocean Telecom is applying on behalf of Apple.The Canadian application was opposed in August 2005, by a Canadian company called Comwave who themselves applied for the trademark three months later. Comwave has been selling VoIP devices called iPhone since 2004.

Shortly after Steve Jobs' January 9, 2007 announcement that Apple would be selling a product called iPhone in June 2007, Cisco issued a statement that it had been negotiating trademark licensing with Apple and expected Apple to agree to the final documents that had been submitted the night before.On January 10, 2007, Cisco announced it had filed a lawsuit against Apple over the infringement of the trademark iPhone, seeking an injunction in federal court to prohibit Apple from using the name.More recently, Cisco claimed that the trademark lawsuit was a "minor skirmish" that was not about money, but about interoperability.

On February 2, 2007, Apple and Cisco announced that they had agreed to temporarily suspend litigation while they held settlement talks,and subsequently announced on February 20, 2007, that they had reached an agreement. Both companies will be allowed to use the "iPhone" name in exchange for "exploring interoperability" between their security, consumer, and business communications products.

The iPhone has also inspired several leading high-tech clones,driving both the popularity of Apple and consumer willingness to upgrade iPhones quickly.

On October 22, 2009, Nokia filed a lawsuit against Apple for infringement of its GSM, UMTS and WLAN patents. Nokia alleges that Apple has been violating ten of the patents of Nokia since the iPhone initial release.

In December 2010, Reuters reported that some iPhone and iPad users were suing Apple Inc because some applications were passing user information to third-party advertisers without permission. Some makers of the applications such as Textplus4, Paper Toss, Weather Channel, Dictionary.com, Talking Tom Cat and Pumpkin Maker have also been named as co-defendants in the lawsuit.

Since April 20, 2011, a hidden unencrypted file on the iPhone and other iOS devices has been widely discussed in the media.It was alleged that the file, labeled "consolidated.db", constantly stores the iPhone user's movement by approximating geographic locations calculated by triangulating nearby cell phone towers, a technology proven to be inaccurate at times.The file was released with the June 2010 update of Apple iOS4 and may contain almost one year's worth of data. Previous versions of iOS stored similar information in a file called "h-cells.plist".

F-Secure discovered that the data is transmitted to Apple twice a day and postulate that Apple is using the information to construct their global location database similar to the ones constructed by Google and Skyhook through wardriving.Nevertheless, unlike the Google "Latitude" application, which performs a similar task on Android phones, the file is not dependent upon signing a specific EULA or even the user's knowledge, but it is stated in the 15,200 word-long terms and conditions of the iPhone that "Apple and [their] partners and licensees may collect, use, and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of [the user's] Apple computer or device".

The file is also automatically copied onto the user's computer once synchronized with the iPhone. An open source application named "iPhoneTracker", which turns the data stored in the file into a visual map, was made available to the public in April 2011.While the file cannot be erased without jailbreaking the phone, it can be encrypted.

Apple gave an official response on their web site on April 27 after questions were submitted by users, The Associated Press and others. Apple indicated that the data is a crowd-sourced location database cache, used to make location services faster, and that the volume of data retained was an error; they issued an update for iOS (version 4.3.3, or 4.2.8 for the CDMA iPhone 4) which reduced the size of the cache, stopped it being backed up to iTunes, and erased it entirely if whenever location services were turned off.