The attack of the paranoid lawyer, part X

Remember Aquamatic, the little shareware app that could easily turn out Aqua buttons (both the transparent and the white square ones)? It caused a bit of a stir in the circles of graphic and web designers when it came out recently.

Well, the British makers of Aquamatic and other Mac shareware, RealMac, just had to pull it out of their site and attempt to substitute the copies held by registered users by their other main product, Button Builder. This was strange enough, but the reasons, as explained in their letter and the new software's ReadMe, are even weirder:

Q: Why has "Aquamatic" changed it's name to "Button Builder" ?

A: Because Apple Computer said we had to stop distributing Aquamatic in it's current form, below is a short clip from the letter they sent us...

"It has recently come to our attention that RealMac is selling and distributing shareware known as Aquamatic on your web site at http://realmacs.co.uk that may infringe Apple's intellectual property rights. As we understand it, Aquamatic is intended to create aqua buttons for web sites and multimedia projects. We believe, however, that the Aquamatic program improperly uses Apple's trademarks, imitates the look and feel of Apple's graphical user interface known as Aqua"

Q: Where can I get the Aqua buttons form that used to come with Aquamatic 1.0?

A: You can't! We had to stop distributing them for the reasons mentioned above.

(...)

That was that. And they changed their website too... before, it looked just like a Mac OS X application, really impressive. Now it's simply very nice. But this spells trouble for the myriad of sites that have begun incorporating Mac OS X-lookalike designs in the past months.

The funnier part is that, if you were a registered AquaMatic user, you have lost none of your trademark-infringing functionality... which was just to ease a really not-that-difficult task. We really do not understand Apple...