Yeah, I'm definitely with Microsoft on this one - it's one thing when trademarked terms become synonymous with products in the public lexicon, and it's another entirely when companies trademark
extremely generic terms that are just descriptions of functionality. What Apple has done would be like a shoe store trademarking "Shoe Store", and then suing competing shoe stores when they try to describe their business as "a bloody
shoe store" - an "App Store" is a store for apps (or applications if you want to be precise), there is just no sane way to argue that Apple is in the right here.
App Store isn't a name, it's a bloody description.
esperandote said:
it's like the word "photoshoped", just because everyone say photoshoped to any image editing doesn't mean photo shop (tm) is free to use.
No, no it isn't, not even a little bit - the term "Photoshopped" has taken the proper name of a popular/predominant graphical image manipulation program and used it as a verb to describe the output of graphical image manipulation; Apple has taken a store that sells apps and trademarked it. The difference is that there really
isn't an alternate way to say what the "App Store" is - it's a bloody
app store.
We only know what "Photoshopped" means because everyone knows what Photoshop is and what people use it for, the term itself is
not a self-contained description of what the individual using it intends to convey by invoking the term: If I say to you "That screenshot was totally photoshopped", what I
mean is "Someone has clearly manipulated that image prior to publication", i.e., that I think it has been "faked".
App Store on the other hand is its own description - how would
you explain what an app store is, hmm? And that is the problem, because you wouldn't even need to - it's a store that sells apps, "App Store" isn't a proper name at all. If Apple had come up with some less descriptive phrase that simply became synonymous with the concept of an app store, trademarked that term, and Amazon was trying to use
that word for their own app store, then I would be defending Apple in this dispute (as unsavory as I find such a position, given I don't much care for Apple as a company). But that's not what they did, and that's why there don't seem to be many responses in this thread supporting Apple's position - the average internet denizen might not know a lot about the legal environment of business and trademark law, but we're
damn good at detecting "total bullshit", and that's precisely what Apple's trademark of "App Store" is.
