Apple Granted Trademark For Its Stores

walterbyrd sends this news from ZDNet: "The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office approved Apple's request to trademark the design and layout of its stores last week, according to patent office records. ... Apple has requested that no store be allowed to replicate various features, including 'a clear glass storefront surrounded by a panelled facade' or an 'oblong table with stools... set below video screens flush mounted on the back wall.'"

Comments

Apple's done it again!

[Anonymous Coward]

An oblong table? Any idiot could think of that. But an oblong table with stools and screens nearby? That's the genius of Apple.

Re:What in the fuck?

[hduff]

The bowing to the excesses and insanity of capitalism has reached bizarre extremes. This is how little kids act. "Mommy! Jimmy is COPYING me! Make him PAY!"

FTFY

Inaccurate Summary

[Grond]

In this case the trademark is defined by the illustration, which is basically a line drawing of an Apple Store minus the logo. The text in the summary is drawn from the "description of mark" field, which is just a description of the image and does not define the trademark. Further, the summary suggests that Apple is individually claiming trademark protection on various features of its store design ('clear glass storefront...' or an 'oblong table with stools...'). This is not the case. The trademark claims the entire design as a whole.

Re:Inaccurate Summary

[almitydave]

Indeed, FTFTM:

Description of Mark: The mark consists of the design and layout of a retail store. The store features a clear glass storefront surrounded by a paneled facade consisting of large, rectangular horizontal panels over the top of the glass front, and two narrower panels stacked on either side of the storefront. Within the store, rectangular recessed lighting units traverse the length of the store's ceiling. There are cantilevered shelves below recessed display spaces along the side walls, and rectangular tables arranged in a line in the middle of the store parallel to the walls and extending from the storefront to the back of the store. There is multi-tiered shelving along the side walls, and a oblong table with stools located at the back of the store, set below video screens flush mounted on the back wall. The walls, floors, lighting, and other fixtures appear in dotted lines and are not claimed as individual features of the mark; however, the placement of the various items are considered to be part of the overall mark.

Acquired Distinctiveness Claim: In whole

This is presumably an attempt to deter/combat the copycats that have actually tried to trick people into thinking they're Apple stores.

Sorry to break up the Apple hate

[Trolan]

But Microsoft trademarked their store design too, and had it granted in 2011. This looks much like return fire, and not an opening shot.

http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=85194406&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch

Re:A store cannot look like a store?

[msauve]

I'm not familiar with (UK?) stores, but a quick Google shows that Apple stores are distinctively different than Debenahms (I don't see any video screens, and it's much more cluttered), or HMV (I don't see any tables or wall mounted video displays).

Apple stores do have a distinctive look, and I can't fault them for wanting to keep that unique. I don't think they're trying at all to claim the individual features, but the overall architecture created by a combination of features.

The USPTO does not "approve" trademarks.

[John Hasler]

Nor does it "grant" them. It registers them. They are created by use.

Just to clarify: Service Mark

[Jim Hall]

The summary gives the impression this is a patent, but the /. article title says trademark. Actually, according to the linked USPTO file, it's a service mark.

I had once considered applying for a registered trademark for the FreeDOS Project, just to protect the name. To be clear, a registered trademark is R not TM. But the Apple file is a service mark, or SM. To simplify, a SM is basically the same as a TM, but the understanding is a SM will be for a short term use, for various definitions of "short term" (usually a SM is applied to an advertising slogan, like Walmart's "Save money. Live better.")

First of all, to apply for either mark in the US, you need to pay a fee to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). But even if you file, there is the issue of diligence. If there's a violation (someone uses that trademark or service mark without permission) the mark holder fails to prosecute or take action, the mark can be found in a court to be unprotected and open for use. There are other ways to lose a mark as well.

However, it is not necessary to register a mark with the USPTO in order to claim it as a trademark or service mark. The USPTO says any time you claim rights in a mark, you may use the "TM" (trademark) or "SM" (service mark) designation to alert the public to your claim, regardless of whether you have filed an application with the USPTO.

Owning a mark registration on the Principal Register does give you several things:

• constructive notice to the public of the registrant's claim of ownership of the mark;
• a legal presumption of the registrant's ownership of the mark and the registrant's exclusive right to use the mark nationwide on or in connection with the goods and/or services listed in the registration;
• the ability to bring an action concerning the mark in federal court;
• the use of the U.S registration as a basis to obtain registration in foreign countries; and
• the ability to file the U.S. registration with the U.S. Customs Service to prevent importation of infringing foreign goods.

So really what Apple is doing here is registering the layout and design of their store as a service mark (an identity) so that if someone else comes along and uses the same layout and design, Apple can make a stronger case to sue them. The legal theory is that you could have looked up the service mark to see if someone else was using it so it's harder to defend yourself if you are found to be infringing. Not impossible to defend, just harder.

Companies do this kind of thing all the time. It just doesn't usually hit the news. Coke has a registered mark on the shape their bottle, for example.

This isn't an Apple patent, it's not an abuse of the patent system. It's just a service mark.

Re:I imagine....

[Desler]

Jobs and several Apple employees including Jef Raskin visited Xerox PARC in December 1979 to see the Xerox Alto. Xerox granted Apple engineers three days of access to the PARC facilities in return for the option to buy 100,000 shares (800,000 split-adjusted shares) of Apple at the pre-IPO price of $10 a share.[40] Jobs was immediately convinced that all future computers would use a graphical user interface (GUI), and development of a GUI began for the Apple Lisa.[41]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.

Happy?

Re:I imagine....

[Desler]

How is it new?

Apple had agreed to license certain parts of its GUI to Microsoft for use in Windows 1.0, but when Microsoft made changes in Windows 2.0 adding overlapping windows and other features found in the Macintosh GUI, Apple filed suit. Apple added additional claims to the suit when Microsoft released Windows 3.0.
...

Much of the court's ruling was based on the original licensing agreement between Apple and Microsoft for Windows 1.0, and this fact made the case more of a contractual matter than of copyright law, to the chagrin of Apple. This also meant that the court avoided a more far-reaching "look and feel copyright" precedent ruling. However, the case did establish that the analytic dissection (rather than the general "look and feel") of a user interface is vital to any copyright decision on such matters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corporation

Only people who never actual read the ruling of the case think it had to do with being unable to copyright look-and-feel.

Re:I imagine....

[Desler]

Did you not even read it? Xerox said that to get access to the facilities they had to be paid in stock options. And it wasn't buying it at the "going rate". The quote even says "at the pre-IPO price of $10 a share". That's some pretty bad reading comprehension on your part.

Re:Bad summary

[PRMan]

Courts aren't stupid.

Citation?

Re:What in the fuck?

[mister2au]

You think that their store layout is somehow unique? Except that there are iToys on the tables instead of painted miniatures and dungeon layouts, and the posters on the wall are made with LCD screens instead of paper this is the exact same layout as the game shop down the hill from my house. Well, except that the Apple store doesn't have a carpet full of Doritos crumbs and spilled Mountain Dew.

Yes it is in the context of the trademark application ... Have a read of it

It covers a very specific COMBINATION of Apple's glass frontage design, lighting and shelving NOT THE BASIC LAYOUT ... it is a combination that you would not stumble upon unless you were DELIBERATELY trying to pass yourself off as an Apple store.

Your local games shop is not pretending to be an Apple store (and certainly does not have that specific combination of elements) so is not covered my the trademark - no drama !

Having said that I am certainly no fan of Apple but do understand they want protection against obvious fraudsters who try to pass themselves off Apple stores.

Re:I imagine....

[Anonymous Coward]

... except the degree of copying is vastly overstated by those who always bring it up, and the compensation mysteriously never mentioned. Xerox PARC was inspiration to Apple, not a template which was slavishly imitated.

http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt

Apple essentially paid for a one-time visit where Jobs and some engineers got to walk around a Xerox facility getting demos and taking notes. That's not enough to, ahem, xerox an OS. Not even if you end up hiring a few people away from Xerox (as Apple did). You need continuous hardware and software access to do a good job of copying. What Apple got was... a little less than that. (Amusingly enough, one Apple engineer mistakenly thought he saw the Xerox GUI doing something it actually couldn't, inspiring him to invent one of the cornerstones of Apple's early lead in GUI technology, QuickDraw regions.)

Apple copied almost nothing at the detailed level. I've seen a video of Jobs discussing how, during that visit, he completely missed what was, to him, in retrospect the most important thing about the Xerox GUI: that it was built in a dynamic object oriented language and runtime environment, Smalltalk. The Macintosh GUI was coded in a mix of Pascal and 68K assembly instead, and suffered a lot of long term problems as a result.

(Jobs went on to fix that mistake in his second try at creating a GUI computer at NeXT. His team didn't use Smalltalk as its dynamic OOP language, but it did use one heavily inspired by Smalltalk, Objective-C. Although NeXT was more or less a failure as a computer manufacturer, the software tech worked out pretty well in the long run: OS X and iOS are both direct descendants.)

Re:I imagine....

[um... Lucas]

It wasn't for sale to the public, so going rate is meaningless. Xerox e executives obviously saw enough promise in them that they were willing to invest a million dollars in them and share their technology with them. Because that's actually the gist of the transaction. Apple didn't sell any goods or services - they took an investment.

Xerox cashed out following iPo. Should they have held, that million would be worth 365 million now.

Yes, parc employees weren't happy about it, but management makes the decisions for better or for worse.