14 DAY TRIAL // In its latest legal response to Apple’s intentions of trademarking the “App Store” dubbing, Microsoft argues that the launch of the Amazon Appstore marks the 17th competitor that sees it as vital to use the term to promote their own software venues.
Microsoft said in its filing that, “These uses, despite Apple’s continuing enforcement campaign, show beyond dispute that there is a competitive need for the term.”
The company behind the Windows operating system went on to stress that "Apple strains to keep ‘App Store’ for its exclusive use, even claiming that its online stores are not real stores, only metaphorical ones.”
“But Apple cannot escape the hard truth: when people talk about competitors’ stores, they call them “app stores," the filing added, according to a report by GeekWire.
Microsoft even threw in Steve Jobs’ own statements referring to other application marketplaces which he called “app stores,” likely referring to the CEO’s keynote presentations.
As a response to Microsoft’s initial attempts to thwart Apple’s “App Store’ trademark, Apple argued that the term "Windows" is also generic yet still was granted as trademark because it held "the primary significance of the term to a substantial majority of the relevant public."
Apple believes the same thing applies to its App Store.
Instead of addressing these particular allegations, Microsoft responded by saying that Apple’s latest filing was too long, and used too small of a font size.
The same GeekWire reported earlier this month that MS was accusing Apple of manipulating the text to insert more arguments that aimed to trump the Redmond giant’s opposition to the App Store trademark application.
At the time, Microsoft had asked the US Patent and Trademark Office to demand Apple a new brief which “complies with the rules and does not add any new matter or arguments.”