No, but you can trademark it. It is legally acceptable to own a trademark on a color. I discovered this when I was looking at an issue of Inside UPS (a magazine for UPS employees) and noticed on the back that it said to the effect, "UPS, the package logo, the shield logo, and the color brown are all trademarks of United Parcel Service, Inc." This was quite a shock to me, so I ran to Google and found that the Supreme Court allows color to be registered as a trademark. A color can't be part of the function of a product in order to be trademarked, however. So we're safe from someone suing stainless steel manufacturers because they own a trademark on the color silver.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but you can trademark it. It is legally acceptable to own a trademark on a color. I discovered this when I was looking at an issue of Inside UPS (a magazine for UPS employees) and noticed on the back that it said to the effect, "UPS, the package logo, the shield logo, and the color brown are all trademarks of United Parcel Service, Inc." This was quite a shock to me, so I ran to Google and found that the Supreme Court allows color to be registered as a trademark. A color can't be part of the function of a product in order to be trademarked, however. So we're safe from someone suing stainless steel manufacturers because they own a trademark on the color silver.