Microsoft Fights Apple Trademark On 'App Store'

angry tapir writes "Microsoft is asking the US Patent and Trademark Office to deny Apple a trademark on the name 'App Store,' saying the term is generic and competitors should be able to use it. Apple applied for the trademark in 2008 for goods and services including 'retail store services featuring computer software provided via the internet and other computer and electronic communication networks' and other related offerings."

Comments

Apple was not first user of name 'App Store'

[mysidia]

Pretty sure Sales Force came first.

Back in 2006, when the iPhone was but a gleam in Steve Jobs' eye. And now there are lots of 'app stores'; including Apple's, but also including the Android app store, and others.

So... where is Apple's eligibility for using this descriptive non-creative name as a trademark, if they do not have exclusive use, first use, or even most famous use in commerce?

As far as I'm concerned, Apple's product is the iTunes App Store, which is specific and famous, but App Store is generic, and used by many organization's before and after Apple.

Actually.. when I think of "App Store", the first thing that comes to mind for most people is the Android App Store. If anyone should be awarded the trademark (and they should not), it should be Google.

Re:Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

The frames around an application's UI, that you can move around and such? Those were called "windows" in the trade press before Microsoft wrote their OS. A bit ago Microsoft sued Lindows claiming "Lindows" was too close to their "Windows" trademark. They dropped the suit when the judge said that the Lindows legal team had introduced enough evidence to call into question Microsoft's claim on the Windows trademark, and opted instead to buy the Lindows trademark for $20 million (the Lindows software is now called Linspire).

Still feeling quite so sure of your superiority to the OP?

Re:To be fair

[Andy Smith]

"Apple is trademark happy -- snapping up all i*, and *pod names, including established names like podcast "

Isn't podcast derived from iPod? A downloadable broadcast that people listen to on their iPod. That would give Apple a good claim to the term.

Re:Windows

[TheRaven64]

That's not the word that they chose at Xerox, because they were concerned with the user perception, not the implementation. In implementation, they were just reserved regions of the frame buffer (Smalltalk-76 didn't support overlapping windows), but in terms of user interaction they were things that you looked through into your document - windows. This is why they called them windows (instances of the Window class in Smalltalk-76 and Smalltalk-80). This was almost a decade before MS Windows 1.0 (which also didn't support overlapping windows) was released.