Apple love their trademarks. It genuinely surprises me that they haven’t yet tried to trademark the letter ‘i’ for themselves such that no other English word can legally begin with ‘i’ without prior permission from Apple. Their love of the trademark does occasionally get them into scrapes with other companies. The most recent trademark argument they find themselves in is between Amazon and Microsoft (which – for the purposes of brevity – if acting together I’ll be referring to as Micro-zon).

Apple loves the App Store. It makes them a pretty sizeable chunk of money and it’s something that, when mentioned, immediately brings to mind that silly little ‘A’ shaped logo on the iPhone. The App Store – the place where you can find a remote fart machine for 59p. You’d never buy an item like that in a shop, so why buy it on the iPhone? Anyway, I digress. Apple aren’t the only company to make phones with feature applications. Ohhh no… Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile, Blackberry… ring any bells? Of course they do. Amazon is set to bring out an application store for the Android OS and they’re going to call it – you guessed it – “Appstore”. What a difference a space makes.

Apple obviously don’t like this, so had a winge about it to their local judge. Amazon then responding, in what’s known in the business as a counter-winge, essentially claiming that the term “App Store” is now so generic that it’s unfair for them trademark it. And then – in what can only be likened to a drunk turning up for a fight that has nothing do with him – Microsoft turned up. They’re also not happy that Apple thinks it can trademark the App Store. So what’s it going to do about it? It’s going to moan to a judge – that’s what. Microsoft filed a pretty extensive report claiming that as journo’s etc.. use the term App Store generically, then it must be a generic term. This is an interesting position, coming from a software company who’s most popular release is named Windows. Apple read this and obviously thought Microsoft were a few bananas short of a bunch. So, they filed a rebuttal with the Judge saying that Microsoft were obviously a bit nuts and hadn’t really been fair in the attribution of the generic nature of the “App Store” term. And then what did Microsoft do?

Told the Apple to “do one” because they’d filed their report less than 11pt font which is against regulations. Hence, Apple are back to the drawing board to have a rethink (the filing is only allowed to be 25 pages in a minimum of 11pt – Apple printed their document in smaller type so may have stolen a couple of extra pages). So, what happens of this saga we still don’t know. However, one thing is for sure – there’s a chance that some of us might have to start to getting used to getting our games from the “Program Shop”.

Categories: General

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