Apple Surrenders in Its Fight Against Small Company’s Pear Logo

It looks like the little guy has come out on top in the recent David-and-Goliath battle over the alleged resemblance of a small developer’s pear logo to the iconic Apple fruit.

As we reported last August, Super Healthy Kids, the small developer of an app known as Prepear, a grocery list and meal planning app, suddenly found itself under fire from Apple’s legal team over its use of a pear-shaped logo that Apple tried to maintain was similar enough to its logo to cause brand confusion.

In its original opposition filing, Apple stated that “Consumer’s encountering Applicant’s Mark are likely to associate the mark with Apple,” due to its presentation of a “minimalistic fruit design with a right-angled leaf, which readily calls to mind Apple’s famous Apple Logo and creates a similar commercial impression.”

While most people looking at the two logos would disagree with that assessment, Apple had the battalion of lawyers and the deep pockets behind it to try and enforce its will on Super Healthy Kids and get them to abandon their logo choice.

Except that Super Healthy Kids wasn’t just willing to roll over. Instead, co-founder Russel Monson decided to go to the mattresses over what he declared as “frivolous litigation,” spending many thousands of dollars fighting Apple in the perhaps naive belief that they could reach some kind of consensus and even going so far as to take his case to the court of public opinion with a Change.org petition.

Unfortunately, as much as Monson believed that he and Apple could come to terms, the company instead doubled-down on its fight, registering its trademark opposition in additional countries, while at the same time ignoring requests by Monson to have a reasonable discussion about the matter.

Contrary to the initial belief that this was just “lawyers being lawyers,” it quickly became apparent that Apple’s entire executive leadership was supporting this battle to disenfranchise a small developer that wasn’t even in the same business over a logo that only bore a vague resemblance, and couldn’t honestly be construed as confusing consumers the way Apple’s lawyers claimed it might.

That said, Apple does have a long history of fighting fruity logos that no sane person could actually see as similar, along with logos depicting apples used everywhere from a German cycling path to a Norwegian political party.

A Happy Ending

Fortunately, it looks like cooler heads have prevailed in this particular dispute, and Apple and Super Health Kids have come to terms that will allow the smaller company to continue using its pear logo with only a relatively minor modification to appease Apple’s lawyers and branding heads.

We actually first heard very late last year that Apple might be willing to back down in this particular fight, with news that the two companies had actually put the brakes on the ongoing court battle to sit down at the table and try and work things out more amicably.

Now it looks like we have a happy ending after all.

Late last night, Monson posted an update to his Change.org petition, which had garnered almost 270,000 supporters, noting that the two companies have agreed to end the dispute with only a minor change to Prepear’s logo.

Prepear is pleased to announce that it has amicably resolved its trademark issue with Apple. We plan to make a small change to our logo in the coming weeks and are happy with the way this has been resolved.

Russell Monson, Prepear Co-Founder

It turns out that all Super Healthy Kids needed to do to placate Apple was to change the leaf on top of the pear, essentially squaring it off into a half-circle design, a change that it seems the smaller company was pleased to oblige to end the dispute.

The change can be seen in a motion to amend the original trademark application filed with yesterday the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which also adds that Apple has already consented to the settlement, so it’s ultimately just an issue of the USPTO formally accepting the amending trademark.

It’s such a minor change that it leaves us wondering if it was just a matter of Apple’s lawyer having to insist on something to save face after all the extended legal wrangling, but either way, it seems like it’s the path of the least resistance for Monson and his company.

Prepear’s website already features the new logo, and Monson tells iPhone in Canada that he plans to change the logo in the app itself in the coming weeks, likely whenever the next updates are pushed out, but he’s already shared what the new app icon design will look like.

Unfortunately, while it’s nice to hear that this was resolved in the end, it’s still pretty sad that it had to come to this. While Monson’s says he’s happy with the outcome, it doesn’t change the fact that he already spent many thousands of dollars fighting this legal battle in the first place, and in fact even had to lay off at least one employee from the small five-person company — all things that could have been resolved if Apple had simply been willing to come to the table in the first place.