Fighting Over Little Words

TechDirt: “We’ve covered the ongoing legal fight over who can use the phrase ‘app store’ to describe their store for apps, and the NY Times is highlighting how there’s a ‘great language land grab’ concerning this and other similar legal battles. But the real issue is that this is simply an abuse of trademark law — an abuse brought on by a few decades of people falsely telling the world that concepts and words can be ‘owned.’ Trademark law, of course, was never supposed to be about ‘ownership.’ It was always designed as a consumer protection statute, to avoid consumer confusion.”