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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."
Slashdot could join in by reviving the OMG Ponies theme. Pink is close enough to magenta, right?
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
The magenta "t-mobile" is a temporary response to the letter (in legal terms I believe it's called a raspberry). Their standard logo doesn't look like T-Mobil's at all.
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.
"This thing does science so hard, you say, 'I've never seen that much science.'" -Sam
The real April Fools on /. is that the web server is probably running on Win2k3 for a day.
Usually when these things get posted to slashdot they seem pretty cut-and-dry, and I can't argue with your specific example, but there are some mitigating factors here:
1) T-Mobile's letter was nice (this shouldn't factor in court or anything, but...)
a) they stated they were "obligated" to defend their trademark
b) they specifically kissed engadget's ass
c) there's no doubt that engadget's current logo infringes (this was done intentionally, as a FUCK YOU to T-Mobile)
2) Engadget Mobile specifically deals in the area (mobile phones ya know) that T-Mobile deals in
What if you painted your tractor repair shop John Deere Green? Or used it in your logo?
I'm not sure how this is going to turn out, but I'm not going to cancel my T-Mobile service that I don't have out of spite or anything. Bloggers can be whiny sons of bitches, just like lawyers.
Synergy is your friend
If you wear magenta, however, you probably deserve it.
What I wouldn't do for the ability to mod "-1, Plain Wrong"
Check out this website. It's filled with anti 'T-Mobile owns Meganta' drawings, pictures, comics and graphics.
http://www.freemagenta.nl/
I especially like the one from Michael Wolbert (do a search for his name), somewhere on 1/3 of the page.
You could still have been a wealthy merchant without being a noble - a regular pleb wouldn't be able to afford purple dye, of course, but a number of people might.
Also, it should be noted that only the Roman emperor was allowed to wear an entirely purple piece of clothing at all. Senators (that is, those from the senatorial class) were allowed a broad purple stripe on their tunics; equites (knights) were allowed a thin purple stripe. So even a thin purple stripe (much less expensive than full purple) could get you into trouble.
When I read the article that it dawned on me that the color on the T-Mobile logo isn't magenta anyways the logo #e42384, and magenta is #ff00ff!
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