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The phrase App Store was not in use before Apple's App Store was created. Take a look at Google Trends from the past few years. Nobody talked about it until App

The phrase App Store was not in use before Apple's App Store was created. Take a look at Google Trends from the past few years. Nobody talked about it until Apple used the term, now, it's used like people saying Kleenex when they could have just said tissue. Apple wasn't the first to have a centralized location where users could download software. If they called it the Apple Software Center I bet everyone would be calling their software centers Software Centers and we'd be having the same argument.

watty 15y ago
I think if the word "app" is proven to be generic with prior use, "app store" shouldn't be able to be trademarked. "Kleenex" is a unique word with no meaning prior to Kleenex, not so of an "app store", completely different case.
- Symmetry 15y ago
  Whats worse for Apple, "Kleenex" was so dominant at one point that it came close to being Genericized [1]. If the public doesn't think of a word as referring to a specific product but instead they think of "Kleenex" as a name for all soft facial tissues then in the US at least the "Kleenex" trade mark can lose its legal force. It might be that Apple invented the term "App Store", but as long as members of the public would tend to refer to application repositories from Google or Amazon by the same term, even without Google or Amazon using it, then "App Store" isn't serving a useful purpose as a trademark and doesn't have the same legal force as a word that was in practice only specific to Apple. I, personally, love the fact that the law around trademarks corresponds so well to their purpose - preventing consumers from being confused. This is one of the reasons I don't like the term "intellectual property", it takes three things that are very different legally and lumps them together in a way that sometimes causes people to think that the rules governing one apply to others, or that the attitudes they have towards one form should apply to all of them. Personally I'm pretty ambivalent about whether we ought to have patents and copyrights at all - but I think that trademarks are awesome and we'd be much worse off without them. EDIT: Oops, forgot to put in the reference: [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genericized_trademark http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genericized_trademark
extension 15y ago
Popularizing a term does not automatically mean you can trademark it. Purely descriptive language like "app store" generally cannot be trademarked unless it has "acquired distinctiveness" through use in trade. Apple has to show that people think "app store" means Apple's app store. How many people have to think that, and how technically inclined those people have to be, I don't know. The reaction to this story shows at least that the tech community does not think that. I don't know how trademark law deals with large rifts in public perception. Further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_distinctiveness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_distinctiveness

watty 15y ago

I think if the word "app" is proven to be generic with prior use, "app store" shouldn't be able to be trademarked. "Kleenex" is a unique word with no meaning prior to Kleenex, not so of an "app store", completely different case.

Symmetry 15y ago
Whats worse for Apple, "Kleenex" was so dominant at one point that it came close to being Genericized [1]. If the public doesn't think of a word as referring to a specific product but instead they think of "Kleenex" as a name for all soft facial tissues then in the US at least the "Kleenex" trade mark can lose its legal force. It might be that Apple invented the term "App Store", but as long as members of the public would tend to refer to application repositories from Google or Amazon by the same term, even without Google or Amazon using it, then "App Store" isn't serving a useful purpose as a trademark and doesn't have the same legal force as a word that was in practice only specific to Apple. I, personally, love the fact that the law around trademarks corresponds so well to their purpose - preventing consumers from being confused. This is one of the reasons I don't like the term "intellectual property", it takes three things that are very different legally and lumps them together in a way that sometimes causes people to think that the rules governing one apply to others, or that the attitudes they have towards one form should apply to all of them. Personally I'm pretty ambivalent about whether we ought to have patents and copyrights at all - but I think that trademarks are awesome and we'd be much worse off without them. EDIT: Oops, forgot to put in the reference: [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genericized_trademark http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genericized_trademark

extension 15y ago

Popularizing a term does not automatically mean you can trademark it. Purely descriptive language like "app store" generally cannot be trademarked unless it has "acquired distinctiveness" through use in trade. Apple has to show that people think "app store" means Apple's app store. How many people have to think that, and how technically inclined those people have to be, I don't know. The reaction to this story shows at least that the tech community does not think that. I don't know how trademark law deals with large rifts in public perception. Further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_distinctiveness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_distinctiveness