Steve Jobs Pwns iPodRip App Developer

Steve Jobs. He is a tech luminary, a presentation master and an idolized CEO but he can also be a man of few words.

This week, there has been some drama regarding the app “iPodRip” from developers “The Little App Factory”. iPodRip is an app that lets you copy and transfer your songs from an iPod and iPhone to your computer. It has been used extensively, with over five million downloads.

The issue, as you can already guess, is that the name of app has the word “iPod” in it. Apple’s Legal team demanded that the developer change the name of app and instead of changing it, the CEO of The Little App Factory decides to personally send an email to Apple CEO Steve Jobs to ask if the app name can stay the way it is.

Here is the letter below from The Little App Factory CEO John Devor:

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

That letter is quite amazing. You can clearly see that there was a lot of thought put into it. So naturally, John Devor is expecting a reply and guess what, Steve responded! Check out the response from Steve Jobs below:

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

Steve

Sent from my iPhone

EPIC! One line, two short sentences and sent from his iPhone of all places. LOVE IT!

Oh, and The Little App Factory has since changed the name of iPodRip to iRip.

[CrunchGear]