A federal judge has kicked out Apple’s attempt to get a preliminary injunction to stop Amazon using the Term ‘App store’.
Apple had been trying to force Amazon ( and by default others…) to stop them using the term app store for their newly launched Android Amazon App Store.
Us Federal judge Phyllis Hamilton denied Apple’s request a preliminary injunction, ruling that Apple hadn’t established the likelihood of confusion between the competing brands, oddly she also said that she didn’t agree with Amazon that the mark is purely generic.
Good news as far as I can see, Apple is much to quick to file lawsuits that can only be harmful to the phone industry as a whole, so any clipping of it’s wings is good – In my humble opinion of course!
“The court finds that Apple has not established a likelihood of success on its dilution claim. First, Apple has not established that its ‘App Store’ mark is famous, in the sense of being ‘prominent’ and ‘renowned.’ The evidence does show that Apple has spent a great deal of money on advertising and publicity, and has sold/provided/furnished a large number of apps from its AppStore, and the evidence also reflects actual recognition of the ‘App Store’ mark. However, there is also evidence that the term ‘app store’ is used by other companies as a descriptive term for a place to obtain software applications for mobile devices.”
See the full 18 pages of legal reading HERE !
Glad to see common-sense has prevailed, here.
Shame on you Apple. You can not simply have rights to LIFE itself!
Be careful, they already have iLife and may start pursuing you for copyright infringement! All jokes aside i own an iPhone but im glad that they saw sense in this instance as things are getting a bit silly now!
Proper name for Windoze software is naturally: Exe Store.
App Store would give an misleading impression that OS X software would be available!