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T-Mobile Claims Trademark In the Color Magenta
An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday Engadget Mobile received a nice letter from Deutsche Telekom / T-Moblie demanding that they stop using the color magenta on engadgetmobile.com. ("Yep, seriously" they say.) Today several sites have gone magenta in a show of solidarity."
The title of the page has "t-mobile" in huge letter in magenta, as part of the words "engadget-mobile"
I could totally believe that a non-technical (ok, stupid) person might mistake this for an official t-mobile site.
branding consists of colors, words, typefaces, graphics, and this site mimics a couple of tmobile's elements. It doesn't seem to be a parody or any other such form of protected use.
Any company that wishes to trademark a logo (or other trade dress) should be required to not use things that are already in common usage. Imagine if the American Heart Association went after everyone else who used the color red in their logo?
There's a limited number of colors, letters, and digits. Choosing one of those and expecting it to be unique is stupid.
The letter is a combination of the TMobile trademark lawyers doing what lawyers do...billing hours. Plus, they are protecting the TMoblie trademark. With Trademark law you must prove that you have diligently protect your TM by notifying parties of infringement. In every suspected case. With Endgadget there is no confusion or dilution of the TM. But, if someday TMobile has to defend their TM in court against another mobile provider who might use the color..they can haul out the big box of all the letters they sent to everyone who used Magenta and prove they diligently protected their TM
I'm looking at the calendar and thinking, "this has to be a joke!". But then I think about all the bullshit trademark/copyright/patent lawsuits of the past few years. I honestly have no idea if this is real or not.
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You do realize that they uploaded that logo, the "deceptive" one you're berating, today, which just happens to be April 1? And that they did so specifically to spite T-Mobile? And that they wrote a blog post stating exactly their actions and intent?
Congratulations, you've been had.
Your brain is not a computer.
Not totally sure what your point is. There are plenty of places in the world today where wearing the "wrong" color will get you killed.
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Could this be a publicity stunt for T-Mobile?
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
There's a difference here. UPS has trademarked a specific shade of brown, and protects its use. This would be like having the L.A. Dodgers try to trademark blue, instead of just Dodger Blue.
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Not really, if you stir up the pot then you are likely to lose your trademark status. Going after phone carriers probably ok. Going after bloggers who gives you free advertisement. Probably pretty stupid move both legally and in the business sense.
Even if they do own a trademark on Pullman Brown, Trademark is not copyright. The prosecution of a trademark infringement is supposed to have to show customer confusion or loss/harm involved in the others business.
So if you paint your business car Pullman Brown but don't happen to deliver packages, haul freight, offer business supply services there isn't any reasonable harm to UPS. Now if you opened a store that was called the Unified Parchment Sales, and used a brown and tan logo saying 'UPS Store' on the front, you would probably be guilty of causing customer confusion. Most of the areas where UPS is hopefully in people using brown in similar packaging businesses.
Now of course these days people prefer the threaten, hassle, and hustle methodology of convincing smaller companies to give up defending themselves.
Trademarking a colour is not unheard of, there are plenty of companies who have trademarked a colour. E.g. Cadbury ( the chocolate maker ) has trademarked the colour purple. But note that in this case, you cannot use purple as the main packaging/advertising colour in a chocolate product, it can be used elsewhere without issues. This is just more of the same. The issue will be whether the two companies are 'selling' a similar product.
And purple pixels are even cheaper.
Not if you live in San Francisco.
Try President's Day (Lincoln or Washington's birthday), or maybe Veterans Day. Or you can think of every day on /. as celebrating smart people with integrity, and April Fool's being our day off :-)
Bush actually has a decent sense of humor ... so perhaps one can view April Fool's as celebrating Bush's foolish qualities -- if he didn't have that, then we'd have Cheney as president. Things can always be worse.
...fucking idiots. The site says nothing about a law suit, they merely received a request from the T-Mobile legal department to stop using the color magenta in association with the Endgadget MOBILE section of their site. First of all, READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE BEFORE COMMENTING. How hard is that? Quit this knee-jerk response to something that didn't actually happen. Second, if you are going to comment, KNOW THE FUCKING TOPIC. Trademarks MUST be protected and T-Mobile has a strong brand in the cellular/mobile space built around the color magenta. Asking Endgadget to stop using the color magenta on their MOBILE section is not unreasonable as it does encroach on their trademark. If Endgadget says no (an their response seems to say this in spades) then T-Mobile will need to bring this before a court to actually decide the matter. Shocking as this may be to hear, it really doesn't matter what a bunch of geeks with no experience in the law, intellectual property, or branding and identity think on the matter either.
I will repeat wht I (and others) have said before:
1.) If T-Mobile doesn't defend their trademarks they might lose them.
2.) The color magenta is SUPER EXTREMELY ÜBER-IMPORTANT to T-Mobile and its sister companies in Germany. It defines their whole corporate design and every German knows them by this color. They can't afford to lose their color trademark.
3.) The Engadget Mobile logo is similar to T-Mobile's corporate design in more ways than the color - the decorative bar between the words is similar to the "Digits" (small squares) that have been a mainstay of the various T-corporations' corporate design for years.
4.) The letter written by T-Mobile was polite, non-threatening and friendly. They merely asked Engadget to please pick a different color.
5.) Engadget showed that success does not equate professionalism and decided to answer in the most pissy way possible. "We don't have to play nice! We're the internet! Woo!"
I agree that corporations usually are soulless beasts hellbent on making our lives miserable in the name of profit, but T-Mobile is hardly being evil here. They perceive a threat to one of their most important trademarks and before they even get out the legal club they nicely ask Engadget to pick a different color. Given that losing that trademark could cost them millions of Euros and years of lost PR work they're being exceptionally nice.
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It's not copyright, it's trademark. I know it's possible to trademark colours in USA, but you cannot (at least until recently) trademark colours in the EU. You can trademark a pattern in a combination with colour(s), but even then it's not certain.
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