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Comment by wayneftw | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for your comment. One minor nitpick: The words app store shouldn't be capitalized because Apple does not have a trademark on that term. They have a pending trademark and when Amazon started their "AppStore" app store, Apple took them to court over it and they ended up dropping the case before it was concluded because they would have lost.

Of course your iPhone automatically capitalizes it and it's still listed as a trademark on their site because Apple is so petty.

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OK, so, as a native English speaker (and maybe specifically one in America), I generally try to capitalize "proper nouns", whether you have standing for a trademark or not... I thereby will happily talk about how "the App Store is an example of an app store" (though I also tend to disambiguate at least one instance with "Apple App Store", which, I think, certainly should be capitalized).

> Capitalization is the difference between "I had to help my uncle Jack off a horse" and "I had to help my uncle jack off a horse", amirite?

Well... "I helped my uncle, Jack, off a horse" is the actual correct way to write that sentence.

Uncle is a title, so if it’s used as GP did (rather than as a noun like you did), it doesn’t require the commas in this way. Consider the word Mister/“Mr.”

Both are correct but use the words differently.

Yeah. FWIW, I had considered modifying it to capitalize "Uncle" as well, but honestly I don't know the rules for that, and the original copy of this I was quoting hadn't done so (though I had seen others which had) ;P.

"because they would have lost" -> we don't know if this would indeed happen because words "app" and "store" are so generic... writing them capitalized does not change this much, because everything you write in a title is capitalized in English language...

If Apple dropped the case, I think it is fairly safe to assume they saw defeat in their future. Any reason to assume otherwise?

If we're guessing, another reasonable guess is that they worked out a licensing deal so they wouldn't have to fight Amazon but they could still go after the next guy that tries it.

Right, but that is the same as a loss being expected. They want to wait for someone that they think they can make a winning case against. Right?

Not really. What they want is to protect their Trademark and avoid direct competition. Licensing serves to protect the mark in a way that just ignoring Amazon's behavior doesn't.

Apologies, I should have asked if you have evidence that they licensed it? If so, that would require Amazon to note it in their site, no? I see no reason to think that is the case.

You're on 3rd order assumptions at this point

This feels like a useful metric, but one I haven't really heard asserted before. Care to elaborate?

It's nothing formal just saying an assumption based on an assumption keeps having lower chances of being correct the further you take it.

Companies also drop cases where winning is simply not worth the money. Owning an App Store trademark doesn’t seem be valuable in the way say iPad is because it’s not a separate product.

It might have been a settlement out of court?

That isn't the same as dropped, to me. So, maybe?

Maybe it was part of the settlement that they "drop the case"...

That’s not the test, Word is a trademark despite WordPerfect coming out several years earlier. Trademark law is kind of silly, but forcing every product to be called either a made up word or some long description wouldn’t be a net benefit.

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