ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 5 -- United States Patent no. D1,065,156, issued on March 4, was assigned to Apple Inc. (Cupertino, Calif.).

"Earphone" was invented by Jody Akana (Los Altos Hills, Calif.), Bartley K. Andre (Palo Alto, Calif.), Jeremy Bataillou (San Francisco), Daniel J. Coster (San Francisco), Daniele De Iuliis (San Francisco), M. Evans Hankey (San Francisco), Julian Hoenig (San Francisco), Richard P. Howarth (San Francisco), Jonathan P. Ive (San Francisco), Duncan Robert Kerr (San Francisco), Shin Nishibori (Kailua, Hawaii), Matthew Dean Rohrbach (San Francisco), Peter Russell-Clarke (San Francisco), Christopher J. Stringer (Woodside, Calif.), Eugene Antony Whang (San Francisco) and Rico Zorkendorfer (San Francisco).

The patent w...