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Apple Continues Sending Cease and Desist Letters Regarding 'App Store' Usage

admanimal said:
Right, because I'm sure Apple's legal team spends their nights as iOS engineers.
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They are spending tens of millions of dollars on lawyers. That money could go to hire developers and engineers to make their products better. Every dollar they spend on legal attacks against competitors is another dollar they don't have to spend on bug squashing. They clearly need more people in the bug squashing department, huh?
 
rorschach said:
Thanks for proving Apple's case: "App Store" clearly CAN be trademarked, since you just quoted a trademark filing from the USPTO. The mark was abandoned, and now Apple has claimed it because they are actually using it.
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So 11 years ago it could be trade mark. It means nothing today. It being Abandon does not help Apples case either.

I also would not be surprised if they all start using the same defense. Point to the ruling Amazon got so they can keep using their name and then say they want to wait and see on if the Trademark will be denied. You have some big players saying Apple should not get it.

Also the lawyers are going to have to answer the question on "How is App Store not generic when your OWN CEO used it as a generic terms in a public keynott?"

All Apple is doing is hurting it image and showing that it is becoming worse than MS ever was.
 
callme said:
How generic are:

Windows or Internet Explorer?

Perhaps they should be removed from MS at the same time?
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Not at all. I kinda find it baffling that anyone can seriously make the arguement that they are!

You'd have a case if the products were called MS Operating System or MS Web Browser
 
Northgrove said:
"App Store" (capital A, capital S, taken together as a unit) is only popular today because Apple popularized it and transformed the mobile software landscape. I don't think Apple should be victims of their own success, with enough companies trying to ride on their popularity wave that the trademark becomes so commonly used that it's invalidated.

"app" may be generic, "store" may be generic, but that's not what's trademarked here. Apple hasn't trademarked "app" to speak of "Apple applications", but only the term "App Store" in the business of online stores.

Narrowed down like that, App Store wasn't used before the iPhone for online stores, and Apple was fairly granted the trademark in my opinion. Judges shouldn't overrule fair play for some reason like "oh, now so many have started using Apple's trademark, that we can just as well invalidate it!" Ridiculous.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genericized_trademark

/end discussion

Northgrove said:
It's obvious Amazon is just dancing around the trademark, and reminds me of the Linux distro called "Lindows". That was struck down by Microsoft, forcing them to be renamed to "Linspire".
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Microsoft tried to strike them down. In the end they just dropped coin:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/microsoft-to-buy-lindowscom-domains-for-20-million
 
Rodimus Prime said:
So 11 years ago it could be trade mark. It means nothing today. It being Abandon does not help Apples case either.

I also would not be surprised if they all start using the same defense. Point to the ruling Amazon got so they can keep using their name and then say they want to wait and see on if the Trademark will be denied. You have some big players saying Apple should not get it.

Also the lawyers are going to have to answer the question on "How is App Store not generic when your OWN CEO used it as a generic terms in a public keynott?"

All Apple is doing is hurting it image and showing that it is becoming worse than MS ever was.
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It does mean something today. The fact that a few companies have started calling their mobile stores "App Stores" — or creating new stores and calling them that — after Apple named theirs such does not make the term generic. Handango and Pocketgear were probably the two most popular mobile stores long before the iPhone and the App Store were released, and they never called themselves "app stores."

Steve Jobs did not use it as a generic term. He used it in the same sense as, "Microsoft is creating their own iPod." If Apple's lawyers can't answer that stupidly simple question, Apple needs new lawyers.
 
Rodimus Prime said:
So 11 years ago it could be trade mark. It means nothing today. It being Abandon does not help Apples case either.

I also would not be surprised if they all start using the same defense. Point to the ruling Amazon got so they can keep using their name and then say they want to wait and see on if the Trademark will be denied. You have some big players saying Apple should not get it.

Also the lawyers are going to have to answer the question on "How is App Store not generic when your OWN CEO used it as a generic terms in a public keynott?"

All Apple is doing is hurting it image and showing that it is becoming worse than MS ever was.
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Apple isn't hurting their image, your so silly, LMAO! only a handful of people think this. Ones who know atleast a tiny bit about business know what's going on, also most people don't care about what apple is doing behind the scenes with this kind of stuff as long as they keep making great products every year. This kind of stuff doesn't even pertain to us. Stop taking it so personal, nobody has to love Steve or apple, my grandmother has an iPad and doesnt know who Steve Jobs is, she just LOVES her device. That's what matters, Jesus tap dancing Christ.
 
benpatient said:
They are spending tens of millions of dollars on lawyers. That money could go to hire developers and engineers to make their products better. Every dollar they spend on legal attacks against competitors is another dollar they don't have to spend on bug squashing. They clearly need more people in the bug squashing department, huh?
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While I am a big supporter of the fungibility of money. It is simply true, based on the experience of the industry, that computer engineering has rapidly diminishing rates of return.

A dollar spent on lawyers is probably way more valuable than a dollar spent on "bug squashers".

Apple does and continues to find the best and brightest engineers that it can. But bugs will always slip through, and the bugs that are there, are not the cause of lack of dollars spent on engineers.
 
It's amazing really.


People go after Loadsys when they pick on the little devs for their patent.

People support Apple when they go after small startups for using their trademark.




Just saying...
 
I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me that the companies named "The Money Store" and "The Car Store" may have set a precedent on this topic.
 
admanimal said:
It doesn't matter how petty it appears. If Apple wants to seriously defend what they believe is their trademark, they have to prevent people from using it. It's just how the system works. It has nothing to do with whether they seriously believe that people will confuse things or not. You can argue over whether Apple should be able to trademark "App Store" but given that is what they want to do, this is how they have to approach it.
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Agree. Apple has obtained the trademark in the EU, and tentative approval in the US (pending the outcome of the MS objection).



(Fair or unfair, wouldn't they be just kicking themselves if someone else applied and won the trademark?)



They have to protect it in the meanwhile, it's just business.
 
I love when people reference the "Windows" trademark being so generic. It reminds me of the chemicals in the pool that turn the water purple when someone pees. You instantly know who the idiots are.
 
LastLine said:
It's amazing really.


People go after Loadsys when they pick on the little devs for their patent.

People support Apple when they go after small startups for using their trademark.




Just saying...
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People love to ride Steve's knob that's why....
 
Last edited:
Booooo, bad Apple. 😡:apple:😡

Just another proof that underdogs should only be supported while they are underdogs. Google and Apple are no different than MicroSloth now (minus the sweaty pits monkey boy)

How many people remember "killerapp.com". (BTW Don't go to that site anymore it's a phishing scam) That was like 10 ten years ago.

Quite frankly the whole thing is kind of stupid. Applications are what computers run. Having an Appstore is just a place where you can buy software to run on your computer. There's positively nothing specific about it. Just that we don't have enough time to use 4 syllable words anymore.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Ya. I hope Apple looses this case.
 
gorgeousninja said:
Yes that is the required standard reply for anyone that doesn't want Apple to win....
it's not true, but facts aren't things some people take much notice of.

There was no 'app store' before Apple termed the idea, but Amazon et al are banking on the fact that if enough competitors use the term it will be deemed 'generic' hence why Apple are going after anyone using that label..

.if they didn't they are tacitly admitting that it has become generic.

It really isn't that hard, it's basic business, try and hold on to what makes you the market leader.
The fact that some judge, who really ought to know better, is letting Amazon steal the idea doesn't make it any less of a case of blatant copying.
It was lazy and devious of them and they should be forced to desist.
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Hang on a sec? I do not care if Apple "wins" it or not... their not a football club or a country I am not on a side of a team that should be "Winning" something....

I like Apple products and I buy them thats it.. doesnt mean I should support everything they do.

When I used to be heavily involved in symbian made apps around the ngage era (yes the N-gage) we used to write what we called APPS for said devices...

We called them apps... not necessarily an APP store.. because when you give away things for free to a community thats not a store. We did actually call them apps though...

Its to generic

The word store is generic... you cant trademark that, the world application is to generic you cant trademark that. The none word "App" is a shortened version of a none trademarkable too generic term.

Thus... the duo "App Store" is to generic.
 
bit density said:
Close... Music Industry...

Use of the word "Apple"

Or have you not been following the Beatles-Itunes-Apple Records controversy.
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Yes, I have - they've reached a settlement - hence now also the Beatles in iTunes....

but, since they're now on the whole "use of generic words lawsuit"... 😱
 
nwcs said:
But there were no marketplaces called "App Store"s that you would get apps for PDAs back in the day. That's the key point here. Certainly there have been app stores forever but none were CALLED "App Store."
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I´ll go now and register "hardware store". Certainly there have been hardware stores forever but none were CALLED "Hardware Store."
 
nwcs said:
Not really. No more than if the president of Xerox said Canon xeroxed something making Xerox suddenly generic. Or if the president of Coke said Pepsi is making their own Coke products rendering Coke as generic from a trademark point of view.
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Actually Xerox did risk losing it's trademark in the past, as did many other companies with their trademarks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genericized_trademark

Other trademarks have come close to genericization, but have been rescued by aggressive corrective campaigns. Such is the case with Xerox for photocopiers, Plexiglas for shatter-resistant polymer glass, Kleenex for facial tissues, Band-Aid for adhesive bandages, and others. A trademark owner takes a risk in engaging in such a corrective campaign because the campaign may serve as an admission that the trademark is generic. So, the owner must irreversibly commit to continuing the campaign until relatively sure the trademark has achieved primary meaning as a trademark rather than as a common name of the product or service.
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Apple is trying to fight a similar battle but in my opinion in their case the chosen trademark name is too generic to begin with being basically a short form of "Application Store".
 
nwcs said:
Not really. No more than if the president of Xerox said Canon xeroxed something making Xerox suddenly generic. Or if the president of Coke said Pepsi is making their own Coke products rendering Coke as generic from a trademark point of view.
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Or Johnson and Johnson saying another companys bandaids.....
that does not make the term bandaids generic,that is their name for adhesive strips.
 
This is one of those times I wish Apple would wake up and not act so silly. It's also behaviour like this that makes me hunt out developers own websites to see if there is a means to purchasing an application or to use it's generic term since the days of the commodore 64 an 'App' in order to avoid paying Apples 30% store fee. I would happily purchase through the apple applications store including there markup if they'd just start to behave themselves.

Profit before product is only going to last so long, It's a slippery slope and there's no coming back from a slide down it.
 
RubbishBBspeed said:
This is one of those times I wish Apple would wake up and not act so silly. It's also behaviour like this that makes me hunt out developers own websites to see if there is a means to purchasing an application or to use it's generic term since the days of the commodore 64 an 'App' in order to avoid paying Apples 30% store fee. I would happily purchase through the apple applications store including there markup if they'd just start to behave themselves.

Profit before product is only going to last so long, It's a slippery slope and there's no coming back from a slide down it.
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Yep - I always download my Software from the developer's webpage and happily ignore the "Available on App Store"-button. Just wonder how big the cut for PayPal is - well, at least it's not 30%...
 
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