Shortly after Apple confirmed its upcoming service iCloud Service on Tuesday, the company sought a trademark registration for the “iCLOUD” trademark in Europe.
The trademark application reserves the trademark under 12 International Classes, including delivery of digital music by telecommunications, online social networking services, multimedia content for a fee or pre-paid subscription, electronic books and magazines, photographic services, games and headgear.
Interestingly, Apple filed application to obtain trademark registration for iCLOUD in Jamaica on 7 December 2010, which application is cited in its recent application for its priority date of registration.
In the US there are currently two records for the iCloud trademark. One is registered to Xcerion, the Sweden-based company that reportedly sold iCloud to Apple for $4.5 million in April. The other appears to be unconnected with Apple. It is registered by Dane Baker of iOS development firm Villain and deals with computer software for mobile phones, as well as the storage and archiving of electronic media. Perhaps it is an attempt at squatting on the term given rumours of Apple’s plans for a service by that name. Who knows? Looks like a trademark registration opposition could be likely.
iCLOUD will be unveiled next week at the Worldwide Developers Conference and until then, much speculation will continue. The scope and classification of the EU trademark application would imply that the service will provide more than just streaming music and insiders say that the iCLOUD tag has been used internally by Apple for several products currently under development.
It appears that that Apple may even offer the service free to Mac OS X Lion users, in hope of driving adoption of the upcoming OS release. The music streaming component, however, is unlikely to be free, beyond a possible introductory or trial period.
Google and Amazon already have a head start over Apple in cloud based services. Nevertheless, it is believed that only Apple has secured licence deals with major music labels such as Sony, Warner Music and EMI, that will certainly put Apple ahead of its competitors.
iCloud could scan the computer and automatically sync songs, movies and TV shows to the cloud giving access to the content you own.