> strawmen Speaking of strawmen: I don't see anyone claiming that "ContactPad" is a generic word. What I see is the claim that it's a non-generic name made fro

> strawmen Speaking of strawmen: I don't see anyone claiming that "ContactPad" is a generic word. What I see is the claim that it's a non-generic name made from generic elements none of which is owned by Apple, containing no bits that are owned by Apple. (That doesn't mean Apple aren't in the right here. I don't know whether they are. You can certainly infringe on a trademark without using the exact mark, and if someone brought out a tablet computer called the EyePad then the absence of the "i" would be no defence. But "ContactPad"? "JournalPad"? Not being a lawyer, I have no more than a guess. But my guess is that Apple's trademark on "iPad" is not in fact enough to make it illegal for someone else to sell a program that runs on an iPad and has "pad" in its name.) > tell me the developer shouldn't have seen this coming a mile away. Now, that I can certainly agree with. (And, also, of course it doesn't matter whether Apple have any sort of credible trademark claim; they can control what gets sold on the App Store without one.) > a particular kind of quark The quarks are: up, down, top, bottom, charmed, strange. (For a while T,B were called truth and beauty). Those are all common English words. Why would the fact that they're also names of quarks stop your lawyers worrying about them? -- Or do you mean that your product was called something like BottomQuark? You do realise that there's a really quite big software company whose name is Quark, right? Or were you talking about soft cheese?