Recipe and meal-planning app Prepear hit the headlines earlier this year when Apple went after the five-person startup over the design of its logo.
The tech giant complained that Prepear’s fruit-based logo was too similar to its own, despite one of them featuring an apple and the other a pear. The logo used by Prepear’s parent company, Super Healthy Kids, uses a strawberry, but Apple is fine with that.
The good news is that Apple, which took Prepear to court over the issue, may be close to resolving the dispute in a way that won’t ruin the latter’s business, according to MacRumors.
Documents filed last week with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board asked for the trial proceedings be suspended for 30 days as the two companies are “actively engaged in negotiations for the settlement of this matter,” suggesting that those involved may be close to reaching an agreement that’s acceptable to both sides.
The story received a good deal of attention last summer after Prepear went public about Apple’s opposition to its trademark application, with the iPhone maker claiming consumers are “likely to associate the mark with Apple” because it features a “minimalistic fruit design with a right-angled leaf.”
You can see the two logos below.
Prepear, whose app has around 30,000 users, responded with an Instagram post saying that “Apple has chosen to go after our small business” and that fighting to defend its use of the pear logo “will cost tens of thousands of dollars.”
Super Healthy Kids launched a petition as part of efforts to get Apple to end its action against the tiny startup, with more than 265,000 people adding their names to date.
“Apple has been opposing small businesses with fruit-related logos by starting expensive legal action even when those logos don’t look anything like Apple’s logo, or aren’t in the same line of business as Apple at all,” the petition says, adding, “It is a very terrifying experience to be legally attacked by one of the largest companies in the world. … We feel a moral obligation to take a stand against Apple’s aggressive legal action against small businesses and fight for the right to keep our logo.”
But as MacRumors notes, despite the 30-day suspension, there’s no guarantee the issue will be resolved amicably, so this could still go either way. If it’s not settled via negotiations by January 23, the case will proceed, with the various legal procedures possibly taking as long as a year to complete.
Digital Trends has reached out to Apple for its take on the issue and we will update this story if we hear back.
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