No more sleepless nights for Apple’s lawyers, at least not until the Nokia and HTC suits begin to heat up. The company is now the proud owner of a slightly used trademark: iPad™, as of March 17, is no longer a Fujitsu mark and has been assigned to Apple. Much speculation had surrounded the trademark process for iPad, as Fujitsu’s mark was being challenged by Apple as early as September 2009, but it looks like the two companies have come to some sort of agreement.Despite Fujitsu’s original 2003 application to use iPad as a trademark for its line of retail handheld terminals, the name’s true master has never really been clear; as Engadget noted in January, there was already a company using “IPAD” as a product name in the payment space, and Fujitsu’s application went stale in April 2009 before the company tried to reactivate it. That’s when Apple’s team started getting into the mix.

Terms of the arrangement have not been disclosed. According to Patent Authority,

“Apple initiated opposition proceedings challenging the validity of the mark in September last year.  However, the proceedings never developed into anything substantive and Apple simply filed three requests for extensions of time, presumably while they were in talks with Fujitsu.”

[via Engadget]