Apple maintains that they can claim the exclusive right to use the name 'App Store'. In a procedure to register this as a trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) they met with a complaint from Microsoft, last January. This week, Apple responded to the objections by a letter to the USPTO.

In case the USPTO assign the trademark to Apple, this becomes an exclusive right to the word "app store", and Apple can summon others to stop using the term. This explains why Microsoft objected and why all manufacturers of mobile phones follow this debate very closely.

USPTO administers patents and trademarks in the United States. The first stage to this is the assessment of requests for the protection of technical inventions (patent) or, as in this case, applications for protecting a brand name (trade mark). To be eligible for an exclusive right to us a term as a trademark, the word must be sufficiently distinctive to the average public and allow for an association with the services or products of the requesting company.

Microsoft considers the words "app" and "store" as being so general that they are not suitable for trademark protection. In addition, other companies also call there application stores for mobile devices ‘app store’ and this term is established with customers of other companies too. This means ‘app store’ is a general or generic term for this type of online store.

Apple disagrees and delicately notes that Microsoft itself has been squabbling for years to capture something as general as ‘windows’. In the fight against violators of the brand Windows, Microsoft has consistently brought forward the argument of association, meaning that the majority of the relevant public links the word windows to the Microsoft operating system. Apple is now using the same reasoning for App Store.

According to the company almost everyone associates the term "app store" with the Apple application store. The combination of the two words is not in the dictionary so this indicates that ‘app store’ is not a phrase that would be too general to establish a brand," says Apple. In addition, the vast majority of mentions of the word "app store" in the media and written texts are about the services of Apple.

It is now up to the USPTO to determine whether the mark can be enlisted. Should Apple's exclusive right to "app store" be established, this will probably lead to lawsuits against competitors, forcing them to rename their application stores.