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Back in the halcyon days of 2008, when the iPad was still a glimmer in Steve Jobs’ eye and Verizon iPhone rumours were only just starting, Apple filed for a trademark on the term “App Store”, its newly launched marketplace for iOS Apps. Specifically, the trademark covered “retail store services featuring computer software provided via the internet and other computer and electronic communication networks”. Sounds fairly vague, right? In fact, that sort of operation had been around for years prior to the Apple Apple Store, websites like Handango had been selling Symbian software to excited Series 60 users for ages at this point.

Like “iPod” before it, the term “App Store” has now passed into everyday usage to describe non-Apple products, and Microsoft has decided to contest Apple’s ownership of the term. In its claim, Microsoft essentially asserts that App Store is no more trademark-able than Grocery Store, as the term “App” simply relates to software, be it Apple’s or otherwise. Microsoft also point to Steve Jobs’ own usage of the term to describe rivals App Store equivalents. In an interview Jobs reportedly said -

Apple has a famously lazy approach to trademarking – when the iPad was launched the trademark still belonged to Fujitsu – Apple simply threw money at the problem until it went away.

Unfortunately for Apple this latest appeal isn’t a question of cash – if the term “App Store” is deemed too generic for a single company to own, then every manufacturer will be free to use it, hopefully putting an end to ridiculous variations, such as RIM’s “App World”, Microsoft’s “App Marketplace”, and Google’s “Market”.

You can read the full complaint over at TechFlashPodcast.