| Aussie law student here. IANAL. I haven't studied IP in a year or so but I'm not convinced that the startup has a huge claim to the name HealthKit at all. I've looked at both US and local law in the past so I'll try and explain in case it helps any founders reading this. "HealthKit", in the context of both healthkit.com and the dev kit describes the intend purpose of the IP. The startup seems to produce a software "kit" for health practitioners and the Apple version is obviously a dev kit that deals with the new health app. Any trademark that describes intended purpose is called a 'descriptive mark' (lawyers are an imaginative bunch) and are generally really hard to protect. You need to show evidence of market use, and for lack of a better word, traction. Apple actually seem to have the stronger argument here: MapKit, GameKit, UIKit etc. have been used for ages and are recognised in the software community as being associated with Apple. This would be categorised as a software trademark and I'm not sure that the startup can establish a strong argument that they've a) established their brand in the software market and that b) they should be able to exclude Apple to prevent confusion. This is consistent with both Aus and US law to my knowledge, and successfully establishing themselves in the Australian market, or filing a trademark here won't bind the US anyway. Bottom line, the more generic and descriptive your name (in context), the harder it will be to successfully defend it. Owning a .com doesn't count for much, if anything (even trying to register a generic descriptive word + .com - mattress.com was registered unsuccessfully IIRC). You need to get eyeballs on it and sell stuff to win this with a common law/equitable trademark. Considering I hadn't heard of HealthKit.com until this happened they might struggle with this. If you're a founder and you want to protect your name, pick a name that is something arbitrary or suggestive. Healthkit.com's claims would be much stronger if it was named Potato or Voozle and Apple used the same name for a dev kit. It makes it far harder to communicate your product quickly but thats the tradeoff. Names that invoke your product through onomatopoeia, like 'Twitter' strike a good balance between effective communication and defensibility. They're bloody hard to come up with though. Hopefully, HealthKit.com use this as an opportunity to get their message out to their target audience, they're getting an audience on hacker news but its doctors they should be going for. As an aside, it's interesting to see how much of the media is confusing the HealthKit dev kit with the Health app. Helps with the story I guess. |