Apple Forcing iPhone Clone Maker Meizu To Shutter Production and End Sales

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iphone_4_android_knockoff

The most notorious iPhone knock-off at all is the Meizu M8, a cheeky doppelganger that looks virtually identical to the iPhone before you dive below the surface into the excremental ocean of its software: a custom-shelled version of Microsoft Windows CE 6. Meizu CEO Jack Wong has been cheekily shining Apple on about the Meizu M8’s more-than-subtle likeness to the iPhone for a while now, having laughed as recently as last month that the new iPod Touch looks just like their upcoming Meizu M9II Android smartphone.

Wong’s probably wishing he’d kept his mouth shut now. According to Wong, Meizu is now being forced by Cupertino’s lawyers to stop selling the M8… and it might be enough to put the company under.

Citing negotiations that apparently went sour, Apple has apparently gone straight to the Intellectual Property Office and demanded a sales and production freeze of the Meizu M8 smartphone based on its uncanny similarity to the appearance of the iPhone. According to Wong, this could be devastating to the company as it prepares to launch its M9 Android smartphone, a refreshingly non-infringing phone:

. I can cope with a production freeze, but not with having our shops closed and thus not being able to use up our inventory. If Apple and the provincial IPO take another insatiable step, I can only go head to head against them.

Good luck with that, buddy. We all love to root for the little guy, and we’d be lying if we didn’t say we hadn’t garnered some impish entertainment for the utter shamelessness of Meizu’s iPhone-like, but this has always been a pretty open-and-shut case of infringement. The M8 looks like it does to confuse people who want an iPhone into buying it, end of story. Wong should have never tried to launch a legitimate smartphone business on the back of a product so obviously legally vulnerable.

[via Engadget]

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