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General Mills Loses Bid To Trademark Yellow Color On Cheerios Box (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: U.S. intellectual property regulators are rejecting General Mills' bid to trademark the yellow background color on boxes of Cheerios cereal. The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board on Tuesday set aside the cereal maker's two-year quest to trademark "the color yellow appearing as the predominant uniform background color" on boxes of "oat-based breakfast cereal." A contrary ruling could have given the Cheerios maker an exclusive right to yellow boxes of oat cereal. General Mills argued that it deserved to be awarded the trademark status because "consumers have come to identify the color yellow" on boxes of oats cereal with "the Cheerios brand." It has been marketed in yellow packaging since 1945, with billions in sales. The board noted that "there is no doubt that a single color applied to a product or its packaging may function as a trademark and be entitled to registration under the Trademark Act." But that's only if those colors have become "inherently distinctive" in the eyes of consumers. Some of those examples include UPS "Brown;" T-Mobile "Magenta;" Target "Red;" John Deere "Green & Yellow;" and Home Depot "Orange." It goes without saying that anybody can still use those colors predominately in their marketing, but not direct competitors.
Regarding the box of Cheerios, however, the court ruled that consumers don't necessarily associate the yellow box of cereal with Cheerios, despite General Mills' assertion to the contrary. Consumers are confronted with a multitude of yellow boxes of oats cereal, the appeal board noted. By comparison, T-Mobile has only a handful of competitors, and none of them uses the magenta color as a distinctive mark, the appeal board said.
Regarding the box of Cheerios, however, the court ruled that consumers don't necessarily associate the yellow box of cereal with Cheerios, despite General Mills' assertion to the contrary. Consumers are confronted with a multitude of yellow boxes of oats cereal, the appeal board noted. By comparison, T-Mobile has only a handful of competitors, and none of them uses the magenta color as a distinctive mark, the appeal board said.
Anyone who thinks a company should be allowed to trademark a particular wavelength of light
Why? When you see a green and yellow tractor in a field; you know its john deere. It's now protected so that another vendor can't use the same green and yellow hues on their lawn and farm equipment ... because that WOULD confuse consumers; which is precisely the point of trademark law.
This really offends you? Because??
They don't own the colors. They own the use of the colors in conjunction with a very limited purpose. You want to make green and yellow guitar and sell it... go nuts. You want to paint your tractor green and yellow after you buy it... go nuts it's your tractor. You want to go into business and sell lawn mowers painted a very particular shade of green and yellow and sell them... because what? You aren't trying to confuse people into thinking they are john deere? Really?
It's on par with trademarks on genes found nature.
The trouble with genes in particular; natural or even not, is that they exist to be spread and copied by biological processes, and they further arise from random mutation. "Owning" intellectual property on something that literally exists to be copied and spread and which can also spontaneously spring into existence where it wasn't before should clearly be a setup for all kinds of inevitable ridiculousness.
Trademarking yellow is obviously bull. But the actual suit was:
1) that yellow when combined with
2) breakfast cereal
3) oat based
4) torus shaped
I hate IP as much as the next self entitled youtube downloader, but 1-4 seems fair.