In this blogpost I will describe what happened after the first blogpost.
Valve response
We got the following email from Valve.
Valve recently filed a takedown notice with Google’s Android Market based on infringement of the trademark Steam by Nasa Trained Monkey’s “Steam Mobile” app. Valve is the owner of trademarks in Steam and the Steam logo. The Steam mark is registered in many countries.
We are happy for developers to use the Steam APIs, but we are concerned about confusion with your use of Valve’s trademarks. Unfortunately, Google’s infringement notice is very generic and does not allow us to explain what we want from the app author. Both of the following changes are required to remedy the trademark issues:
1. Change the name of your app in the title and/or icon to not contain “Steam” first, such as “Nasa Trained Monkey’s Chat for Steam” or some other name that does not confuse the public into thinking Valve created the app.
2. Use an application icon (and any other associated imagery) which does not include Valve’s Steam logo.
If you can make these changes, we’d be happy to see your app going back up. We do appreciate your support of the Steam community. Please respond with any questions. Thank you.
My blogpost was read by Matias Sulzberger @sulzberger. I studied with him in the university and he now works in Google Argentina. He contacted me and told me he was going to show it to someone inside Google.
Thanks to Matias, I met Nicolas Bortolotti @nickbortolotti.
Nicolas is a Developer Relations Program Manager in Google. He took the time to come to our offices to talk about the Android Ecosystem in Argentina.
We explained him our issues with the Android market and how different it is in relation with the AppStore. He told us that he will use our case to find a way to improve the experience.
Conclusion
For now, the situation stays the same but I am happy that someone is doing something about this.
