Jobs Personally Responds to Company’s Plea Against App Name Change

##ICON_NAME## This is an interesting little story. You may have already seen this but, if not, it is an interesting read. It seems that The Little App Factory, a Mac shareware company, received a letter from Baker & McKenzie, the lawfirm that represents Apple.

In the letter the company is told that they must change the name of one of there most popular applications iPodRip and also remove the iPod image from another of their application’s logo.

iRip (formally iPodRip) is an application that allows the user to copy and transfer your songs from iPod™ & iPhone™ to your computer. iRip has been available since 2003 and has had over 5 million downloads.

The Co-owner of The Little App Factory decided to send Mr. Jobs an email addressing the request. Below is that email as well as the response.

Dear Mr. Jobs,

My name is John Devor and I’m the co-owner of a small Mac shareware company named The Little App Factory and a long-term Apple customer and shareholder. I doubt you’re aware but we recently received a letter from a law firm working on Apple’s behalf instructing us that we had violated several of Apple’s trademarks in our application iPodRip and asking us to cease using the name and Apple trademarks in our icons.

We have been distributing iPodRip since 2003 with the aim of providing a method to recover music, movies and photos from iPods and iPhones in the event of a serious hardware failure on their Mac which leads to data loss. Our goal has been to provide the highest quality product coupled with the highest quality service in a bid to resolve some of the angst that is generated by such an ordeal; service befitting of an Apple product. In this department we think we have succeeded as we have approximately 6 million customers, many Apple employees, music artists and other notable people in society. In fact I’d argue that our customer service is the best of all competing applications in our niche as many of them are scams and frauds that leave Apple customers with a terrible taste in their collective mouths. We fear very much that tens of thousands of Apple customers looking to recover their own music and having heard of our product via word-of-mouth or otherwise, will instead find a product produced by one of our competitors, and will wind up the victim of a scam (one closely-named competitor charges a hidden monthly fee, for instance).

It is quite obvious that we mean Apple no harm with the use of the name iPodRip, or of the inclusion of trademarked items in our icons, and in fact I believe that we have been providing an excellent secondary service to Apple customers that has potentially caused you many repeat clients. In fact, we are quite aware that Apple support and store staff have recommended our software on numerous occasions as far back as 2004 so we have felt that we were doing something right!

With this in mind, we are in desperate need of some assistance and we beseech you to help us to protect our product and our shareware company, both of which we have put thousands upon thousands of hours of work into. Our company goal is to create Mac software of the highest quality with the best user experience possible. I myself dropped out of school recently to pursue a path in the Mac software industry, and you yourself have been a consistent inspiration for me.

If there is anything at all you can do with regards to this matter, we would be most grateful.

Best,

John Devor

Surprisingly enough, John received a response to his email from Steve Jobs himself. Below is the response… sent from Jobs’ iPhone none the less!

Change your apps name. Not that big of a deal.

Steve

Sent from my iPhone

A short and pointed reply… I will give him the benefit of the doubt and say it was because he responded from his iPhone.

Check out the full story my CruchGear.

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Comments

  1. HAHA! Wow, that was such a short reply.

  2. that’s crap.. that’s not a real story – I’m pretty annoyed that I read that now!

  3. Just goes to show that Jobs really cares about the people who make his product worth owning.

  4. Wow.. That was a pretty bad way of saying it..
    He couldve been a lil more nice about it

  5. “Change your apps name. Not that big of a deal,” is totally hilarious. I don’t think Steve Jobs had the same “not that big of a deal,” attitude when Apple Records (the Beatles) asked him to change the name of “Apple Computers.”

    How many lawsuits have there been over that name screw-up?

  6. That is so rude to reply so simply. This man has gone to a great deal of letter to contact Jobs personally, and to respond so simply like that says “I don’t care” in a terribly rude way.

  7. Further proof Steve Jobs is a touch-hole. (if this is real). But Regardless…Steve Jobs is a touch-hole