Apple Goes In Even Harder Against Prepear Over Non-Apple Logo

from the this-is-an-apple dept

A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about Apple opposing the trademark for Prepear, a recipe sharing phone app, over its pear logo. The whole thing was completely absurd. The logos don't look anything alike, the color schemes and artistic styles are different, and also a pear is not an apple. I likened the whole thing to those absurd CNN commercials, which should give you some idea of just how dumb this whole thing was. So, thanks to this idiocy being exposed and the public backlash, Apple finally realized the error of its ways and backed off the opposition.

Just kidding. Apple, in fact, has decided to double down in opposing Prepear's trademarks, now going after the Canadian trademark registration for the logo as well.

However, despite the petition now having hit 200,000 signatures, it doesn’t look like Apple is about to let this one go. As further evidence of Apple’s intransigence in this area, iPhone in Canada, which broke the original story earlier this month, is reporting that Apple has in fact doubled-down in its efforts to block the pear-shaped logo trademark registration, taking the fight beyond the U.S. and into Canada, likely as the next step in continuing its opposition to the logo globally.

Worth noting is that Prepear, the threat to Apple as it is, has five employees. That's one less than it previously had, actually, since it had to lay off one staff member due to the ongoing legal fees to fight for its right to have a trademark that is a pear. To try to put public pressure on Apple to stop being the trademark bully, Prepear started an online petition to Apple to back off. After getting thousands of signatures to the petition, Prepear sent it to Apple's PR wing and suggested that everyone get in a room and find an amicable way to end this stupid fight.

Apple's PR group didn't even bother to respond.

This is not just Apple’s lawyers being lawyers, it appears that the organization at Apple stands behind its lawyers. As is the case in all bullying, silence about the behavior of the bully is the same thing as support.

Now, Prepear could just go ahead and change its logo, though what type of pear-based logo Apple would find acceptable is an open question. And, besides, that should be entirely besides the point. Prepear is right to think it should be able to use a pear logo. It doesn't look like Apple, isn't going to create any confusion, and Apple is purely a bully here.

While Prepear expects that its fight with Apple will still cost tens of thousands of dollars before it can see it through to the end, it’s stated that it has no plans to do any kind of fundraising through services like GoFundMe, although they’re still asking for moral support via their Change.org petition, and of course still hoping more people will show their support by downloading and using their app.

How this will turn out is anyone's guess. Prepear seems to want to fight, but Apple can almost certainly squeeze the company out in court until it dies if it really wants to. More public pressure might help, I suppose, but Apple has thus far seemed perfectly willing to ignore the will of the same public it claims to be defending from confusion.

This is how trademark bullying works and it's a lesson being taught by a master at the art.

Filed Under: apples, canada, likelihood of confusion, pears, trademark
Companies: apple, prepear

DailyDirt: Are You Going To Eat That?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There are plenty of food additives that are just fine to eat, and many of them even have scary-sounding chemical names. This doesn't mean that all food additives are bad OR that all food additives are good. While it would be much simpler to make generalizations and label things either good or bad, it's not quite that simple, unless you want to only eat food with a very limited shelf life. Some preservatives reduce food waste and have undetectable effects on the nutritional benefits of the foods they preserve. On the other hand, there are some toxic substances that should be avoided, and they can be all-natural (eg. arsenic) or have some anthropogenic origin.

• Have you ever seen pears individually wrapped in paper? Did you know there are chemicals impregnated into that paper? Do questions make these facts seem scarier than they should? [url]
• The traditional "paddy method" for growing rice in a flooded field can increase the amount of arsenic that the rice ultimately contains. Using less water to grow rice doesn't seem to be a solution because rice seems to absorb other toxic metals in the soil, like cadmium, instead. The amounts of these metals aren't that high, but it might be a good idea to try to remove these elements from farm soils before growing rice in fields that might have elevated levels of heavy metals. [url]
• Urban gardeners who want to grow their own food within city limits might want to test their soil for contaminants like lead, other heavy metals and cleaning solvents. Fortunately, there are a growing number of resources to help urban gardeners to know what might be in their soil and the possible hazards to avoid. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: additives, arsenic, cadmium, chemicals, contaminants, farming, food, gardening, health, heavy metals, pears, rice, toxic, urban gardening