Apple to Bonobo – Retina is trademarked, change your app name

Look, the fact that your app is free is irrelevant: you should drop that from your argument as it has no place being there. If I wanted to make a free operating system called Mac OS X that wouldn’t and shouldn’t change the fact that I shouldn’t do that.

However, the key issue you need to realize here is that you are not falling under trademark law: you are falling under Apple’s developer agreement. I believe in this specific situation under different distribution you actually might be allowed to use that name (although you should talk to your lawyer, as I’m not actually certain of that: it feels a little borderline).

But as you chose to list your product in Apple’s store, and no one has yet gotten around to antri-trust hammering on them for how they run that thing (although even in that universe I am not certain that this trademark thing is unreasonable), they could have a clause “you may not use the letter A in the name of your product” and you’d have to abide by it or get your product pulled.

And, in fact, the document you signed has a clause 5.1 in it that references a trademark guidelines document that states you may not use any of Apple’s wordmarks in the name of your product, and that guidelines page lists no exceptions to that rule. If you want to take your product and sell it elsewhere, then you get to fall back to looking at their actual trademark and seeing what it covers, but until then it doesn’t matter.

App name suggestion: iRiss

Rename it ‘Glaucoma’

How about “Macular degeneration”?

Alternatively, something along the lines of “downscaler”?

You can have more than one trademark for a given word, and Apple does for ‘Retina’: http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4003:o8la6.2.7

That one covers “Computers; computer hardware; computer displays; computer software; handheld mobile digital electronic devices used as a telephone, handheld computer, personal digital assistant, electronic organizer, and electronic notepad, and used to access the Internet, electronic mail, and other digital data”

DeRet, UnRet, NoRet, normualizer, half by half (knd of like half and half), goldiloxizer, Fit MiScreen, Un-corrective Lazer Surgery, Sungazer, Someone Else’s Glasses.

Those are all that come to mind now, I might be back with more if any occur to me.

I thought trademarking common usage, single, English words wasn’t allowed. For example: it’s “Microsoft Word” not “Word” or “Apple Corporation” not “Apple.”

Of course, you’ll notice the total lack of “camera” listed in their trademark. That one belongs (or used to anyway) to Kodak and their famous Kodak Retina camera.

retina spelled backwards aniter

Rescale

BoNoBlur or Hi2Lo