“Amazon.com isn’t the only company being targeted by Apple for using the phrase ‘app store’ in conjunction with its Android marketplace,” Todd Bishop reports for GeekWire. “Seattle-based MiKandi, which bills itself as ‘the world’s first app store for adults,’ received its own cease-and-desist request from Apple this month, asking the company to stop using the phrase.”
“It’s not MiKandi’s first brush with Apple. The company was pushed in the spotlight last year when Apple’s Steve Jobs referred derisively to the fact that there was a ‘porn store’ on Android — referring to MiKandi without using its name,” Bishop reports. “For the record, the words ‘app store’ still appear on the MiKandi site. Co-founder Jesse Adams says they’ll wait it out, for now, and see how Microsoft’s challenge to Apple’s trademark registration turns out.”
Read more in the full article here.
You can put forward the argument that Android itself is porn & Apple should take an injunction out against Google for using the word app in Android. To be substituted with the word ‘pain’ instead as in Android users put up with a lot of pain using apps on their copycat iPhones.
Let’s settle this dispute once and for all. Here are the facts as I know them, not being a lawyer, but a computer user:
1. “.app” has been the file extension for Applications on a Mac since OSX, maybe before.
2. Apple has always named software programs as “Applications” since the Macintosh was introduced.
3. Microsoft has always named them “Programs” or “executables” and the file extension has always been .exe
Is it a coincidence that “app” is part of Apple? Applications, and apps, and .app has always been Mac naming conventions.
Programs, executables, .exe has always been Microsoft naming conventions.
Apple is just being consistent with their naming, unlike Microsoft, and of course Google and others are just hopping on the bandwagon with naming them Apps now. Didn’t the USPTO award Apple the phrase, “There’s an App for that” sometime last year?
Apple should be rightfully allowed to trademark “App” and “App Store”. Let Microsoft call their store “Program Store” or “exe Store”.
Excellent commentary, MacDust.
I have a question re: porn apps. Why does Apple restrcit the sexually explicit apps yet allowing violent apps from someone like Cartoon Network to be sold with no problem? I have my thoughts and opinions about both but that’s not really the issue. As I mention to my wife about the certain “virtues” of the iPhone and pretty much every Mac product, she posed that question to me and I wasn’t sure how to give her a complete answer. Is it a case of selective morality? I don’t know. I would appreciate comments and insight from any and all.