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No, the Kindle Fire is Not Being Spun Off into a New Company

A couple different blogs have turned up the paperwork for the Kindle Fire trademark this evening and unfortunately for me, there’s a know-nothing over at Gizmodo who has misinterpreted what the paperwork means. He’s kicking up all this ruckus over what is a non-story.

First let me tell you what’s getting him all excited. If you go to www.uspto.gov and look up "Kindle Fire", you’ll see that it was registered by a Delaware company called Seesaw LLC. Seesaw also hold the trademarks for Amazon Silk, the new browser for the Kindle Fire.

Please do not get excited about this detail  because it is not news. Lots of companies file for trademarks via a holding company of one kind or another. It doesn’t mean anything.

Barnes & Noble, for example, file all their trademarks under a company called Fusion LLC. That’s just how they have chosen to handle the paperwork; it doesn’t mean anything more than that.

Also, the original Kindle trademark was filed through a dummy company long before the Kindle launched. Amazon used the dummy company to hide the trademark – not because they were planning to spin off the Kindle.

Sorry for getting pissy, folks, but this kind of mindless blogging irritates me to no end.

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Comments


Mike Cane October 8, 2011 um 5:52 pm

Hahahahahaha. Srsly? Why didn’t they go all stupid like this when iPad was found to be — and still is! — registered by "Slate Computing"?


Has Amazon put Kindle Fire under a separate business? | AndroidOS.in October 9, 2011 um 2:43 am

[…] The Digital Reader points out that these trademarks filing might mean nothing at all, because it is a normal practice […]


Steve October 9, 2011 um 11:05 am

Thanks for throwing some cold water (i.e. common sense) on this before the fire, pun intended, spreads any further.


Amazon Registers New Kindle Domain – Let the Tech Blog Frenzy Begin – The Digital Reader December 29, 2011 um 2:38 pm

[…] My usual rebuttal on this topic is that Amazon hasn’t registered this term as a trademark so they clearly aren’t going to use it. That argument doesn’t work anymore because Amazon has taken to registering trademarks just before announcing the product.  For example, the Kindle Fire trademark was only filed the day of the press event. […]


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