14 DAY TRIAL // A well-known Mac developer has recently contacted Apple’s Steve Jobs regarding a legal matter, particularly the name of its flagship product – iPodRip. John Devor of The Little App Factory send a lengthy email to Apple’s CEO, explaining how he and his company had put hard work and tons of resources into developing iPodRip. However, the app seemingly violated several of Apple’s trademarks.
The application in question is touted by The Little App Factory as being “the most trusted music transfer ripper in the world with over 5 million downloads!” Trying to protect its feat, John Devor sent the following email to Steve Jobs.
Dear Mr. Jobs,
My name is John Devor and I’m the co-owner of a small Mac shareware company named The Little App Factory and a long-term Apple customer and shareholder. I doubt you’re aware but we recently received a letter from a law firm working on Apple’s behalf instructing us that we had violated several of Apple’s trademarks in our application iPodRip and asking us to cease using the name and Apple trademarks in our icons.
We have been distributing iPodRip since 2003 with the aim of providing a method to recover music, movies and photos from iPods and iPhones in the event of a serious hardware failure on their Mac which leads to data loss. Our goal has been to provide the highest quality product coupled with the highest quality service in a bid to resolve some of the angst that is generated by such an ordeal; service befitting of an Apple product. In this department we think we have succeeded as we have approximately 6 million customers, many Apple employees, music artists and other notable people in society. In fact I’d argue that our customer service is the best of all competing applications in our niche as many of them are scams and frauds that leave Apple customers with a terrible taste in their collective mouths. We fear very much that tens of thousands of Apple customers looking to recover their own music and having heard of our product via word-of-mouth or otherwise, will instead find a product produced by one of our competitors, and will wind up the victim of a scam (one closely-named competitor charges a hidden monthly fee, for instance).
It is quite obvious that we mean Apple no harm with the use of the name iPodRip, or of the inclusion of trademarked items in our icons, and in fact I believe that we have been providing an excellent secondary service to Apple customers that has potentially caused you many repeat clients. In fact, we are quite aware that Apple support and store staff have recommended our software on numerous occasions as far back as 2004 so we have felt that we were doing something right!
With this in mind, we are in desperate need of some assistance and we beseech you to help us to protect our product and our shareware company, both of which we have put thousands upon thousands of hours of work into. Our company goal is to create Mac software of the highest quality with the best user experience possible. I myself dropped out of school recently to pursue a path in the Mac software industry, and you yourself have been a consistent inspiration for me.
If there is anything at all you can do with regards to this matter, we would be most grateful.
Best,
John Devor
In what was a very surprising move, Apple’s CEO replied personally to the email (using his iPhone), advising Devor to simply change the name of the app. Apple, as fans should know, will not stand any product that contains trademark material, which obviously includes the “iPod” dubbing. Below is Steve’s reply, in its entire(ty) ten words.
Change your app's name. Not that big of a deal.
Steve
Sent from my iPhone
So, that’s why iPodRip is now iRip. The app is truly great. Use the download link below to grab it and rip as many as 100 tracks from your iPod or iPhone for free. If you feel it’s keeper-material, buy a $14.95 license and use it for as many rips as you wish.