The judge presiding over the Apple and Amazon lawsuit over rights to the "appstore" name has told the two companies to sit down and at least try to settle their dispute before trial.
San Francisco U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Laporte issued an order Tuesday telling the two sides to talk it out. This doesn't mean they'll come to terms before the August 19 trial, but they must at least pretend to try.
If the talks, first reported by Bloomberg, don't lead to a settlement, the mess lands in U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton's courtroom in Oakland. Hamilton, like Laporte, seems tired of the bickering. On January 2, Hamilton dismissed Apple's claim that the Amazon Appstore for Android was falsely advertising itself as an app store for iOS apps. No one is confusing the Appstore for Apple's App Store, she said.
Apple filed its lawsuit against Amazon the day the Appstore for Android (which only sells apps that run on Google's Android operating system) went live, back on March 22, 2011. The iPhone maker is accusing Amazon of infringing on its copyrighted "App Store" name. Meanwhile, Amazon countersued Apple, arguing that "app store" is a generic phrase and that Apple shouldn't be the only company to use the term.
