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Comment by RussianCow | Hacker News Reader

Wait, I'm confused. Why did Apple take the game down worldwide instead of only in China? They only "violated" Chinese copyright law, but they're punished for it globally?

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No inside info here, but my guess is this is a nuanced situation that broke Apple’s internal review process. This situation is thoroughly off script, requires a political and legal understanding of multiple countries trademark frameworks, with potential penalties for not complying quickly. They probably just messed up and someone internally will try to bring it back online outside of China now that this is getting wider coverage.

My guess: (1) It's probably a violation of Apple's terms of service to distribute an app that infringes another's trademark and (2) the app probably still displays the infringing mark "点击英雄" somewhere, for example if a user sets the phone language to Chinese.

Trademark jurisdiction is geographic, not linguistic.

Jurisdiction limits where a lawsuit can be filed. It does not limit what Apple can put in its terms of service for the App Store.

Per [1] my understanding is that they took down the game worldwide, but that the action will only affect Chinese-speaking markets since the English name was not trademarked in China.

Perhaps if they had trademarked the Chinese name in the US (assuming this is possible) they could fight this. Or maybe they would have to fight it in every sovereign country, e.g. Taiwan (ROC), Malaysia, etc.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/bs6n3l/apple_remov...

Apple took down the Clicker Heroes app in all languages, English (for which the company does hold a trademark) included, worldwide.

But why don't they remove the Chinese localization like that person is saying and get it re-activated? Is that not possible?

This is a post from the developer which doesn't make sense if it's impossible:

> We can re-name it in China, yeah. With a ton of effort changing all of the artwork we created with the old name. But renaming "Clicker Heroes" (which we already trademarked) in the U.S. and EU would be senseless

I would imagine that they're working on it. But, as devil's advocate, I might ask instead "why didn't Apple remove the offending app only from the region in which it was deemed to be infringing?"

Apple recognized Chinese claims of IP over the rest of the world.

Says a lot about how they think about privacy too.

Apple doesn't toot their privacy horn in countries like China for a reason

Apple knows where their future is...

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