Bell IP Holdings

Last updated

Bell IP Holdings is a joint venture of AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, and Altafiber (or their respective subsidiaries) which owns the rights to the former Bell System logos and trademarks outside of the U.S. and Canada. It also administers a variety of related common assets such as the domain name bell.com.

In the United States, the aforementioned operating companies each own concurrent rights to the Bell trademarks. Bell Canada retained sole rights to the marks in that country after its spinoff from AT&T in 1975.

Bell IP Holdings was created as result of the sale of Bell Communications Research, Incorporated (Bellcore) to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) in 1996.

As a part of the court-ordered restructure of AT&T in 1984, the Bell Logo and Trademarks had been granted to Bellcore, to own and manage on behalf of the seven Regional Bell Operating Systems (RBOCs) and two of the smaller former Bell telecoms, centered in Cincinnati, Ohio and Hartford Connecticut.

The RBOC's determined that the sale of Bellcore to SAIC should be limited to the software and tangible property owned by the consortium, but that the ownership and related value of the Bell name and logo needed to remain with the sellers. Bell IP Holdings was created for the purpose of sustaining that ownership, and thereby preserving the Intellectual Property (IP) value for the Owner Companies (OCs) over time, despite the inevitability of subsequent sales, reallocations and reassignments of specific rights.


Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Intellectual property</span> Ownership of creative expressions and processes

Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets. The modern concept of intellectual property developed in England in the 17th and 18th centuries. The term "intellectual property" began to be used in the 19th century, though it was not until the late 20th century that intellectual property became commonplace in most of the world's legal systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Regional Bell Operating Company</span> U.S. regional telephone company created by 1984 break of AT&T

A Regional Bell Operating Company (RBOC) was a corporate entity created as result of the antitrust lawsuit by the U.S. Department of Justice against the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) in 1974 and settled in the Modification of Final Judgment on January 8, 1982.

Ownership is the state or fact of legal possession and control over property, which may be any asset, tangible or intangible. Ownership can involve multiple rights, collectively referred to as title, which may be separated and held by different parties.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bell Canada</span> Canadian telecommunications company

Bell Canada is a Canadian telecommunications company headquartered at 1 Carrefour Alexander-Graham-Bell in the borough of Verdun in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is an ILEC in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec; as such, it was a founding member of the Stentor Alliance. It is also a CLEC for enterprise customers in the western provinces.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ameritech</span> Subsidiary of AT&T

AT&T Teleholdings, Inc., formerly known as Ameritech Corporation, is an American telecommunications company that arose out of the 1984 AT&T divestiture. Ameritech was one of the seven Regional Bell Operating Companies that was created following the breakup of the Bell System. Ameritech was acquired in 1999 by SBC Communications, which subsequently acquired AT&T Corporation in 2006, becoming the present-day AT&T.

CTV Northern Ontario, formerly known as MCTV, is a system of four television stations in Northern Ontario, Canada, owned and operated by the CTV Television Network, a division of Bell Media.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bell Media</span> Canadian media company

Bell Media Inc. is a Canadian media conglomerate that is the mass media subsidiary of BCE Inc.. Its operations include national television broadcasting and production, radio broadcasting, digital media and Internet properties.

Pacific Telesis Group was one of the seven Regional Bell Operating Companies, sometimes also referred to as "RBOCs" or "Baby Bells", created in 1983 in preparation of the breakup of AT&T as a holding company for Pacific Bell and Nevada Bell, Pacific Telesis International and several other non-regulated companies including PacTel Mobile Services and PacTel InfoSystems. It was acquired by SBC Communications in 1997.

U S West, Inc., was one of seven Regional Bell Operating Companies created in 1983 under the Modification of Final Judgement, a case related to the antitrust breakup of AT&T. U S West provided local telephone and intraLATA long-distance services, data transmission services, cable television services, wireless communications services and related telecommunications products to defined areas in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. US West was a public company traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "USW" with headquarters at 1801 California Street in Denver, Colorado.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Altafiber</span> American telecommunications company

Cincinnati Bell, doing business as Altafiber, is a regional telecommunications service provider based in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. It provides landline telephone, fiber-optic Internet, and IPTV services through its subsidiaries Altafiber Home Phone and Hawaiian Telcom, which are the incumbent local exchange carriers for the Greater Cincinnati metropolitan area and Hawaii. Other subsidiaries provide enterprise information technology services and long distance calling.

Founded in 1907, Electrohome was Canada's largest manufacturer of television sets (TVs) from 1949 to 1987. The company was also involved in television broadcasting, and was a leader in data, video, graphics displays and projectors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Breakup of the Bell System</span> 1982 U.S. government action to end AT&T Corps monopoly over telephone services

The breakup of the Bell System was mandated on January 8, 1982, by a consent decree providing that AT&T Corporation would, as had been initially proposed by AT&T, relinquish control of the Bell Operating Companies, which had provided local telephone service in the United States. This effectively took the monopoly that was the Bell System and split it into entirely separate companies that would continue to provide telephone service. AT&T would continue to be a provider of long-distance service, while the now-independent Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), nicknamed the "Baby Bells", would provide local service, and would no longer be directly supplied with equipment from AT&T subsidiary Western Electric.

Analog Display Services Interface (ADSI) is a telephony technology that is used in plain old telephone service (POTS) or computer-based private branch exchange (PBX) telephone service. It works in conjunction with a screen-based telephone ("screenphone") or other compatible customer-premises equipment (CPE) to provide the user with softkey access to telephone company or internal PBX custom calling features. It is an analog service because it uses analog frequency-shift keying (FSK) technology to interact with an LCD screen via short, low-baud rate, downloads to refresh and re-program softkeys in real-time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">YP Holdings</span> Funds

YP Holdings, now a wholly owned subsidiary of DexYP, is the American parent company for YP LLC. Its products include printed telephone directories, yp.com and YP app. YP offers local search, display ads and direct marketing. On July 31, 2012, YP was included in PaidContent50's list of "the world's most successful digital media companies" based on 2011 digital ad revenue.

Advanced Mobile Phone Service, Inc. was a subsidiary of AT&T prior to the Bell System Divestiture. Abbreviated AMPS, the company was created in 1978 to build and operate the new Advanced Mobile Phone System, also abbreviated AMPS. AMPS was developed by Bell Labs to replace older, severely limited radiophone services, such as IMTS. AMPS was one of the first modern cellular phone systems, which remained in operation until 2008.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bell System</span> 1877 American telephone service monopoly

The Bell System was a system of telecommunication companies, led by the Bell Telephone Company and later by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), that dominated the telephone services industry in North America for over 100 years from its creation in 1877 until its antitrust breakup in 1983. The system of companies was often colloquially called Ma Bell, as it held a vertical monopoly over telecommunication products and services in most areas of the United States and Canada. At the time of the breakup of the Bell System in the early 1980s, it had assets of $150 billion and employed over one million people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AT&T Corporation</span> American telecommunications company

AT&T Corporation is the subsidiary of AT&T Inc. that provides voice, video, data, and Internet telecommunications and professional services to businesses, consumers, and government agencies.

The history of AT&T dates back to the invention of the telephone. The Bell Telephone Company was established in 1877 by Alexander Graham Bell, who obtained the first US patent for the telephone, and his father-in-law, Gardiner Greene Hubbard. Bell and Hubbard also established American Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1885, which acquired the Bell Telephone Company and became the primary telephone company in the United States. This company maintained an effective monopoly on local telephone service in the United States until anti-trust regulators agreed to allow AT&T to retain Western Electric and enter general trades computer manufacture and sales in return for its offer to split the Bell System by divesting itself of ownership of the Bell Operating Companies in 1982.