Leading to speculative rumors that it's spinning off the device

Oct 10, 2011 14:10 GMT  ·  By

In an interesting, but possibly inconsequential move, Amazon has filed for trademarks of its upcoming Kindle Fire tablet and Amazon Silk browser, but not under its own name. Rather, the trademark applications are filed by Seesaw LLC, presumably, a subsidiary of Amazon.

As discovered by Fusible, there are five trademark applications registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, all filed at the end of September, on the same day Amazon revealed the device.

Amazon filed for trademarks on "Kindle Fire" and "Amazon Silk." There are three applications for Kindle Fire, each have a different stated purpose, for example one focuses on the name of the device itself, while others focus more on it being a publishing platform and so on.

The applications were filed by Amazon's regular attorney, also named on many of the company's other trademark fillings.

It is possible that Amazon was trying to disguise the fact that the trademarks are related to the company, but since they were filled on the same day it revealed the device, it doesn't make much sense. The fact that there was a "Kindle" and an "Amazon" in the names gave it away as well.

Since the filings were discovered, there has been some speculation of Amazon spinning off the Kindle Fire into a new company. It is unlikely though, the product is too young for this to make sense and it's too woven into Amazon as a whole for it to have any reason to exist independently.

Most likely this was just some paperwork shuffling, lawyers are great of 'generating' complexity where there is none to begin with.

Whatever the case, the Kindle Fire is set to have a great holiday season. It is already topping Amazon's best selling list and is said to have been bought in impressive numbers already.

That said, Amazon has never revealed sales numbers for the regular Kindle devices so don't expect it to do so for the Kindle Fire anytime soon.