ION Audio Guitar Apprentice might be pulled off the shelves

ION Audio must be pretty red-faced after hearing that the recently unveiled Guitar Apprentice at CES 2012 has infringed on concepts that Behringer sent to the US Patent and Trademark office – more than one and a half years ago, to boot. Apart from the product concept, the trademark on the name “Guitar Apprentice” does not belong to ION Audio, but rather, is the intellectual property of another company known as Legacy Learning Systems.

To further compound the problems surrounding the Guitar Apprentice peripheral, the headstock design on this guitar-shaped controller might be brought into dispute by Schecter Guitars. No idea on how the designers and folks at ION Audio managed to perform so many oversights in the process of designing the ION Audio Guitar Apprentice, but with different quarters having different viewpoints on it, would the device actually make it to the market eventually, or when (and if) it does, will it come in a revamped design?