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Apple: an 'App Store' Is Not a Store For Apps
recoiledsnake writes "What would be your first guess about what an app store sells? Don't be fooled, Apple warns, the phrase 'app store' is not generic and can only be used to describe Cupertino's... um, app store? 'Apple denies that, based on their common meaning, the words "app store" together denote a store for apps,' Apple said in a Thursday filing with a California district court. All this notwithstanding that Jobs himself used the phrase generically while referring to Android app stores. We've previously discussed this ongoing legal battle."
It's nothing new from Apple. Remember that Apple always ignores everyones patents when it doesn't feel like paying for them (all the Nokia thing), but if someone else uses their patents Apple sues them. Same thing here. Apple and Steve Jobs are just being retards and think they can do whatever they want. And still MS gets blamed for being evil and Apple with its fully closed garden is some kind of white knight...
if they simply ignored Apple? If someone came around to shut them down, they'd say "Really? You think our app store is confusingly called an App Store? Go away and grow some common sense."
John
"App store" is short for "Apple store"! Of *course* nobody else can use it! Not even if they're selling actual fruit!
If the "App" is short for "Apple" (as they're presumably arguing), then that means that they're calling their online applications store the "Apple Store," which seems to conflict with their physical hardware-oriented stores of the same name. Methinks that would indicated that "Apple" was not what they meant there.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to listen to the Beatles on the Apple record label. Of course, in that case, Apple argued that "Apple" was a generic term. I guess things have changed.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Maybe Apple needs a Kleenex(tm) to cry into and a Band-Aid(tm) to make it all better...
Well, yeah. However, this isn't a "defend your patent or lose it," case where a patent-holder is forced to defend their trivial feature even though they don't really care to; Apple applied for the "AppStore" trademark exactly for this eventuality. They don't want anyone else to be able to use the phrase "App Store" to refer to a place where you can buy apps.
So, how is this at all different from the way Apple has been making the same claim for the past several weeks?
Slashdot needs to serve ads and Apple hasn't done anything else to bitch about.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I sure hope that Groklaw keeps us informed about Apple's litiguous behavior. Next thing you know is that Apple will tell us is that Ivey never heard of the IBM Simon when coming up with the iphone touch interface.
Part of the difference between Apps and Applications as soon as Apps made it into the mainstream Macintosh OS not just i[Phone] OS, was that Apps are trusted pieces of software through the App Store, while Applications were dirty malware ridden software you got off of the internet that isn't trusted and signed by Apple. To allow App to mean a shortened version of Application again means for it to be okay to download software that Apple doesn't approve of.
Also, if you ask some people, it has always been "Executable Binaries" on *nix systems based on different terminologies used between UNIX falvors and Kinuix distros, and occasionally just to be contrary and start a fight.
Just in case you're not a troll and really are this miss informed about those words your throwing about as Mutually Exclusive when they really are Generic Terms. Here is a News Paper Scan from the now about-to-be-abandoned scan archive. See the Date Feb 27, 1997 along with office 97 all highlighted for you.
Down is up, right is left, B, A, B, A, Start.
Wait, what?
Awesome!
The ExBin Store!
You heard it here first folks, so it's mine... all mine !!
It's an invalid trademark. It's entirely generic and deserves no protection whatsoever.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Not Plaid. iPlaid.
Mod parent -1 on the rag. No, seriously, on a planet w/ real violence against actual non violent protests, getting all kinds of worked up about a turn of phrase that means mocking the unworkable solutions of a bunch of utopians is at best clutching your pearls(Oh the horror inflicted upon those poor clams!). Please take your self righteous anger and go volunteer at a soup kitchen or a free clinic and do some real good rather than playing arbiter of language and its use on Slashdot.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
Although, Jobs himself used the term generically. From the legal filing (excerpted from The Register):
While IANAL, I take the phrase "easiest-to-use, largest app store" to imply that there are others - presumably, smaller, harder to use - but, hey, that's just me, parsing English... Further quoting The Register article and filing - and this seems funny to me (emboldening mine):
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Racism implies that a person is being prejudged by an inherent physical trait which they have no control over. Being a drugged out loser is a completely rational decision that each hippie makes, and it is perfectly fair to judge them for it.
Ahahahaha, oh my. Seriously? You fail reading comprehension, my lefty comrade. You fail hard. And you must not be much of a leftist AT ALL, or you would know what the term means. "Hippie punching" refers not to any sort of physical violence, it refers to the fact that even on the left, politicians try to find someone to the left of them to attack.
When Rahm Emmanuel called leftists "Fucking retards," THAT was hippie punching. In fact, there was a huge shitstorm over it where just about everyone on the left was using the term "hippie punching" and accusing the White House of it. Sorry we forgot to call and tell you about all the fun.
When I was volunteering with Food Not Bombs in San Francisco and the cops threw me to the ground, stood on my shoulder blades, zip-tied my hands and pulled up HARD on my arms, that was not hippie punching. That was just plain old police violence.
See the difference? Generally, only those on the left get accused of hippie punching, because on the right, it is just par for the course. Man bites dog and all that.
Shit.
You do know I am not actually advocating biting a dog here, right?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The same should then hold for e.g. Windows.
Except Microsoft were so defensive over the name that they sued Lindows.
As someone who actually has a scar on the back of his head from a cop that said, and I quote "Fucking niggers and God damned hippies, i don't know which I hate more' (and BTW that "fucking nigger" I was driving was a baptist minister that was doing a mini tent revival tour to raise money for the homeless, whom I was playing bass for and driving as a favor and because I believed in the cause even though I'm an atheist, which he would always counter with "Just because you don't love God doesn't mean he doesn't love you"), allow me to say, from the bottom of my heart.....please get the panties out of your ass dude.
Jokes and satire are what we use to know only alleviate some of the hasher realities of this world we live in, but to also shine a light on people's misconceptions without being ugly about it. It is like what my GF who is Cherokee says when people start talking Spanish to her, assuming because she is brown she must be a Mexican "Me no Mexican, Me Cherokee, Me scalp your ass!" and by doing so sets the record straight without any preaching or PC bullshit (and always gets a laugh out of me when I see their faces).
So please, do get the panties out your ass, the sand out yo vagina, or however it is kids put quit being a stuck up prick these days. It is all the PC bullshit that leads us down the slope where you have "victim classes" and "hate crimes " (excuse me? If someone bashes my head in it don't count as much if my head is white? WTF?) and other "sensitivity" horseshit.
Oh and since I'm an atheist Irish/Creek Indian mix, feel free to make all the Godless Heathen, Drunken Mick, and Wild Injun jokes you like. If it is a good one I'll even be passing it around so please keep all jokes GPL or PD.
Now as for TFA? Apple is one of the most lawsuit happy corps bar none, so is anyone surprised? Everyone made a stink about MSFT and TomTom while ignoring the fact that MSFT offered TomTom (who are making money with their devices, not giving them away) the same RAND pricing they offer the flash manufacturers, no discrimination because they weren't using WinCE, and in the entire history of the company they've been the instigator of a whole 7 lawsuits in the company's history. I wonder how many Apple has started? because I bet it is a hell of a lot higher.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
We can tell racist jokes. It is physically possible. It is also physically possible to eat dog shit, punch a pregnant lady in the stomach, and stab a baby. Those things are only slightly less repugnant than telling racist jokes. However, we can still tell jokes about assholes like you. Did you hear the one about the racist that got shot in the face? Yeah, that's the punchline, you are supposed to laugh now.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
.app in 1985: http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2173906&cid=36196908
it's in my head
That would make sense if Microsoft was actually selling windows like Anderson and not an operating system. Same would be true if Apple was a fruit vendor or Yahoo selling rednecks.
"Coined" the top rung of the distinctiveness ladder in trademark law. (The others are "arbitrary", "suggestive", "descriptive", and "generic".) As I understand it, it denotes a word created by the producer of a good or service specifically to be the distinctive mark for that service.
Whether or not "app store" was widely used is irrelevant. The fact is that "app" was widely used years and years before this to refer to programs/software/applications. Where does one sell "apps?" An app store. If that isn't obvious, I don't know what is.
I'm confused. Can I still punch a hippie or did you explain away my justification for it?
Do you really think racist jokes are worse than stabbing babies?
We can tell racist jokes. It is physically possible. It is also physically possible to eat dog shit, punch a pregnant lady in the stomach, and stab a baby.
What's more racist? Telling a joke about a specific group of people (doesn't have to be derogatory to be classed as racist nowadays) or being told you cant tell that joke because of the colour of your skin?
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Assuming that everyone that tells racist jokes is a racist is fucking stupid. Comedy based on stereotypes are just funny; and series like Goodness Gracious Me elevate it to excellency. The fact that we are so hung up on races just shows our immaturity.
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Microsoft did, effectively, lose that suit (it paid money to Lindows in a settlement, though the latter agreed to transfer their trademark to MS).
Look, you know all those stupid Slashdot threads where people just post stuff like "Oh yeah? Well I'm going to patent patenting, hahaha, I'm so funny, nobody's ever thought of that joke before", or "I'm going to copyright the wheel", or "I'm going to trademark 'searching'"?
Well, this is a trademark just as stupid as the examples above, except that Apple's being serious. People are coming up with the most bizarre justifications, including the utterly bizarre claim that "App" hasn't been in common usage for about 20-30 years (it most certainly has!), but in the real world, app store is an obvious, natural, generic way of describing the consumer interfacing side of a vendor of computer software, the kind of combination of words that people have naturally used many years before Apple did what it did without even thinking about it.
Apple kinda knows that already. They didn't call their music store the Music Store or even the Tunes Store, they originally called it the iTunes Music Store and then shortened it to iTunes Store once it became more generic in usage. It wouldn't take a lot to fix this, they're just being assholes.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.