COM2US is bullying independent game developers!

Tower defense games have been around for a very, VERY long time (I used to play tower defense mods in Warcraft III, back in 2002) and it's become a well established genre in casual gaming. In 2008, the company COM2US was awarded the US trademark for the term "tower defense" (along with Korea, China, and a host of other countries) and they've been using it to bully small developers in the Apple app store. This was a failure on the part of the USPTO, as the term shouldn't have been trademark-able, but now that Apple is enforcing it, it's opened a whole new can of worms. What if some company decides to trademark "space shooter", "first person shooter", or even "arcade game"?

Most of the casual games you play on your phones or on the internet have been made by small two or even one-person development teams. We developers don't have the legal resources to fight this sort of thing in court.  The best we can do is change our games to comply with the laws, even if that means we have to change the whole title and lose name recognition (which is very important for searching in the app store, and can mean we don't make any sales).  Even the incredibly popular Bloons Tower Defense had to change its name, and it predated the patent!

Please sign this petition and agree to boycott any games made by COM2US until they agree to stop bullying developers and drop their ridiculous trademark claims.