I am as sick of the Doodle meme in iOS games as anyone – it’s unoriginal and quite simply boring. But trying to claim that you own the Doodle term or art style seems a bit absurd. Doodle Jump itself isn’t even unique – it just got many things right. It’s an old art style applied to a game type that’s been around forever.
via 148apps.com
This is the sort of thing where I wish people would just do the right thing, before the lawyers need to get involved.
Claiming trademark on “doodle” does seem preposterous. But I can’t say that I don’t understand at least a little bit why Lima Sky would be frustrated. Hundreds of developers are making money with crappy products by throwing “doodle” in their titles, hoping that unsuspecting customers will somehow associate their crap app with Doodle Jump.
That isn’t to say all “doodle” apps are in this category, but many, many are. People are doing the same with Angry Birds, Cut the Rope—pretty much any app that has seen a degree of success.
Of course, if users would stop buying these knockoffs, the problem would be solved. But that isn’t going to happen. At the same time, calling in the lawyers isn’t necessarily going to earn the Lima Sky guys much goodwill in the development community. These guys, until today, had a reputation for being a couple of nice fellas. That’s bound to change really fast.
It’s a page from Apple’s playbook, of course. Apple has sent thousands of cease and desist letters to companies and websites using “pod” and other Apple-product-related terms. It’s never sat well with me, because I don’t like the behavior on either side of the issue. And often innocent people and companies get caught in the middle of those two sides.
Perhaps a better solution for the App Store would be for Apple, as curator, to simply start rejecting these cheap knockoffs instead of approving them. After all, Apple reserves the right to reject any app, and a crying developer wouldn’t get much sympathy if he or she blogged about his or her ripoff app not getting approved. It even says right in the App Store rules that apps that don’t add value or that copy the features of other apps that are already in the store can be subject to rejection.
“We don’t need any more fart apps.” They can even just stamp that on every cheap ‘Doodle’ knockoff rejection letter.
But Apple gets enough bad PR about App Store rejection that they wouldn’t want to add fuel to that fire. It would probably do serious damage to their claim that the vast majority of apps are approved.
But if the store ends up getting filled with nothing but crappy ripoffs of the few good apps that were in there in the first place, then what’s the point of curating at all?
