Apple is sending takedown notices to several game developers using "memory" in their App names, as the maker of the board game Memory is claiming that they infringe on a 42-country-wide trademark.
Apple is sending notices to several developers asking them to remove or rename Apps that have 'Memory' in their titles. The notices are coming at the request of German company Ravensburger, which claims to hold trademark for the word in several European countries, where it sells a very popular board game simply titled "Memory." Gamasutra has received confirmation from two separate App developers about the notices, though neither Ravensburger nor Apple have responded to our requests for commentary. Darren Murtha, half of the duo behind the popular Preschool Memory Match, tells us that he was forced to remove it from all 42 countries, as he's too busy working on another app to re-submit this one with a new name. "We plan on changing the name in those countries and uploading a new version early next year," he tells us by email. The news could be a headache for quite a few developers: a cursory glance through the United States App Store shows over 50 games with "Memory" in their titles, most of them card-matching memory games similar to Memory. And though Ravensburger's trademark doesn't extend to the United States, it is an easy assumption that many of these Apps have international versions available. The countries in which Ravensburger claims to hold the trademark, according to the Apple notice that one developer forwarded to us, are as follows: Armenia, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Equador, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Russian Federation, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine and Venezuela.
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