Sue Grabbit and Runne
The great mobile Internet land-grab is fast becoming, perhaps inevitably, mired in litigation.
Amazon launched its highly anticipated Appstore today, which promises to bring competition to individual mobile platforms by offering a truly alternative way to buy apps from a source independent of the platform owner.
Initially this means Google and Android, and Amazon is sweetening the pot by offering Angry Birds Rio, which it has exclusively, for free initially. However while you can install the store in the UK, it doesn't look like you can download apps yet.
But Google hasn't been the first tech giant to openly challenge this Amazon initiative. That pleasure has fallen to Apple, which has made it clear for a while it feels it owns the trademark for ‘App Store' and should be able to use it exclusively. Microsoft contested this earlier in the year, arguing it's a generic term. It's certainly clear that the two words separately are generic, so Apple must feel it's when they're used together that it has a claim.
And that seems to be regardless of there being a space between the words. Amazon is calling its mobile app marketplace ‘Appstore', and Apple's not happy. According to Bloomberg, Apple filed a complaint last Friday saying: "Amazon has begun improperly using Apple's App Store mark in connection with Amazon's mobile-software developer program,".
To me this seems silly. Yes Apple has been the pioneer of mobile apps and launched the first app store, but everyone refers to mobile apps as merely apps, thanks in large part to Apple's own marketing. In the US shops are called ‘stores'.
Apple has argued that App Store is no more generic than ‘Windows', but I think this is disingenuous. Windows means a very specific product family in the tech space and, to the best of my knowledge, Microsoft has never sued any glaziers. The app store is not a product it's a concept, a genre even, and thus is far more generic.
Not that Microsoft is staying out of this sort of thing - far from it. The software giant has announced it's suing Banes & Noble, Foxconn and Inventec over alleged Android patent infringements in the Nook e-reader.
You can read a blog post from Microsoft lawyer Horacio Gutierrez here, but here's his list of the functionality he reckons Microsoft invented:
- Give people easy ways to navigate through information provided by their device apps via a separate control window with tabs;
- Enable display of a webpage's content before the background image is received, allowing users to interact with the page faster;
- Allow apps to superimpose download status on top of the downloading content;
- Permit users to easily select text in a document and adjust that selection; and
- Provide users the ability to annotate text without changing the underlying document.
Once more this seems like vindictive and selective use of intellectual property law to stifle competition or, in this case, to recoup money having failed to do so.
Microsoft made a point of noting how HTC has been a good little OEM and paid Microsoft license fees for some of the functionality in it Android phones. At the same time it has sued Motorola for failing to do so. It seems like a pretty big coincidence to me that HTC is also a WP7 licensee and Moto isn't.
As is usually the case, this shouldn't really affect end-users. Amazon will keep the Appstore name for as long as it takes for this to run its course, by which stage it should be well enough established that any legally-required name change won't be much of a problem. The Microsoft case will probably result in some kind of out-of-court settlement, and the big winners will be the lawyers, just for a change.
