Some extremes: Soundtrack, Afterburner, Aperture, Cocoa, Exposé, etc.
Some extremes: Soundtrack, Afterburner, Aperture, Cocoa, Exposé, etc.
'App Store', 'Multi-Touch', 'FaceID', and others that Apple claims though are definitely questionable IMO. When you have to jump through linguistic hoops to describe your product because someone's trademarked the obvious descriptive language, there's a problem. I don't know either. I guess, considering how the legal system generally works in the US, that someone would have to legally challenge their validity, and nobody wants to go against Apple in court.
To be fair I'd say most of the trademarks they claim are pretty reasonable, though: https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/...
Edit: Did a bit of looking into the App Store trademark and it looks like both Amazon and Microsoft did challenge this, but both settled out of court with unknown terms, and the trademark stands as a result.
This is a great example of how the USA legal system is broken.
The responsibility for preventing bad trademarks from being registered should not lie with other gigantic companies, which have as much incentive to collude as to compete.
Now the public suffers because the bad trademark stands, and the people who are likely to be harmed by trademark trolling (smaller companies that do not have the money to fight Apple's questionable trademark) remain at risk of harm, potentially indefinitely, because trademarks don't expire under US law.
If the case went through the full court system, then at least the outcome would be decided in the public eye and could be said to have been fairly evaluated and decided. A settlement is as if the case never happened at all!