14 DAY TRIAL // The USPTO this week granted Apple trademarks for AirDrop, a technology introduced in OS X Lion, and WebKit, the engine powering many of Apple media-centric applications and numerous web browsers out there.
Spotted by Patently Apple, the AirDrop trademark is not for the file-sharing tool itself, but rather for the logo.
AirDrop was introduced in 2011 with OS X Lion. It’s a wireless ad-hoc service that lets you share files with other Macs on the network without the efforts usually associated with pairing, and stuff like that.
Apple originally filed for the AirDrop logo trademark in early December 2011, and now they own it.
The USPTO also granted Apple a trademark for WebKit. This time, it’s a name-centric trademark which Apple originally filed papers for in November of 2009.
Open sourced by Apple in 2005, WebKit is the underlying engine of most popular web browsers today, including Google Chrome and Apple’s own Safari. Opera is preparing to employ the engine as well, probably because it has lost every single Mac user from its desktop market share pie charts.