NAGOYA —

Aiphone Co, Japan’s largest intercom maker, said Monday it has reached an ‘‘amicable’’ agreement with Apple Inc to settle their trademark dispute.

Aiphone began talks with Apple last summer claiming that Japanese characters for the U.S. computer maker’s ‘‘iPhone’’ could infringe on those for its ‘‘Aiphone’’ trademark as the spellings are similar in the Japanese katakana syllabary.

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3 Comments

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  DenshaDeGO at 08:31 AM JST - 25th March

  Who is Aiphone? Anyone?

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  notimpressed at 02:39 PM JST - 5th April

  everyone in Japan that has any knowledge of an iPhone should be able to read english well enough to decipher iPhone so that there is no need to write it in katakana. Just a cheap stunt to get recognised by an unknown company.

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  johnf150 at 04:55 AM JST - 1st May

  Aiphone has been around for 75 years, Who is Apple?

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