This week, Apple finds itself in several rather awkward courtroom dramas: being asked by a U.S. judge to find a way to go away; being sued by a European Union nation for something it should have fixed a year ago; and being railroaded by a Russian company for failing to police the App Store. All aboard! It's time for another trip on the Law & Apple Express.
Apple has been working the court to stop Amazon from using the term Appstore to sell Android software. Cupertino's main argument is that consumers and developers would be confused because the words in Apple's App Store looks so much like the words in Amazon's Appstore.
If that seems silly to you as a consumer and/or a developer, and even a little insulting, it probably is. Could you imagine having to sit through a trial about that? Apparently U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Laporte can't, as according to Bloomberg she has ordered Apple and Amazon to meet on March 21 and attempt to settle this before another costly and exhaustive bucket of courtroom drama.
Absolutely totally confusing.
It is difficult to reasonably imagine how anyone would go to Amazon to look for Apple iOS software; it is bordering on the absurd to think that Apple can make a legitimate claim on the words App or Appstore. However, there has not been a lot of success recently in court-ordered negotiations; Apple and Samsung tried and failed, as did Google and Oracle. Hopefully, this case is a little easier to sort out, and the lawyers can reach some sort of agreement so we are not subjected to a spring and summer full of trial news about who owns the right to the word App.
Apple seems to be waffling on its commitment to European Union consumer law, and the Belgian court is going to take them to task for it. This does not seem like a case that Apple has much of a chance to win, particularly because Apple lost the same case to another EU court in Italy in 2011.
The point of contention remains the same: according to European Union law, all consumer electronic products must come with a minimum of two years of protection. Apple is not ignoring that law; every device they sell in the EU comes with a two-year warranty. The problem is that Apple fails to explain this to consumers and pushes hard to sell them the AppleCare warranty — the one that extends warranties from one year to two. That is, the same coverage that EU consumers are already getting by law.
We are still stuck on the waffles part. Mmmmm.
The EU was extremely clear last year in Italy that this AppleCare warranty shell game was not going to fly, and fined Apple more than a million dollars, and then another quarter of a million, for doing the same thing. Tim Worstall, writing for Forbes, states that, "I wouldn’t say that I’m 100% certain that Apple will lose this case: but I would say that I am 99% so." We think that 1 percent chance is being generous.
TechCrunch is reporting that Russian Railways has filed a lawsuit this week against Apple for reasons "still not entirely clear" but most likely having to do with trademark infringement. The suit, which claims damages of 2 million rubles (about $65,000), is based on the railroad's desire to "protect its intellectual property, especially since the trademark is well known in the Russian Federation.”
It appears the problem may be that third-party apps in the Apple App Store are using all or part of the railroad's logo. Actually, it is clear that this is happening, but we are still not sure if this is what the lawsuit is about.
Uh, yeah. That's not going to last too long.
Apple remains ultimately responsible for the content in their curated App Store, and most likely they will handle this as they have other similar cases in the past: by removing the offending apps and making developers redesign them without stolen logos.
This is not the first time that Apple has crossed tracks with a railroad company in court. Who can forget last year, when the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) accused Apple of copying a railway clock design for the new iPad clock app? The clock is a legend in design, and the SBB was not about to let you have it on your iOS device for free. Not when a real one sells for about $400! That case with the SBB allegedly settled out of court with a whopping licensing fee estimated to be worth over $21 million (US). Too bad Cupertino couldn't pay that one in rubles.
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