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."

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Way to Stick It To Your Sponsor

[eldavojohn]

Did anyone else find it uncomfortably odd that there was a big magenta T-Mobil ad [photobucket.com] right in the middle of Engadget's page as they "stuck it to them."

You know, refusing to host their magenta ads might be a better way to stick it to them ... or perhaps they were asking you not to use magenta so that users wouldn't confuse the ad with the site?

simple solution

[hack slash]

Engadget should just reply saying "We respect your trademark for the color Magenta, however, we are using the colour Magenta."

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Re:Are they kidding?

[DrYak]

Trademark on a color?

It's Deutsche Telekom. It's in Europe.
Here in Europe, the state sponsored university hospital tried to sue our local medical student association because we made a spoof of their logo for the association, this kind of stupidity happens. But, on the other hand, as this is Europe, not suit-trigger-happy USA, the suit wasn't allowed*, and the students even pulled a weirder spoof as their next iteration of the logo.

* - In most country were trademarks are valid, a company has to prove that you are confusing their consumer on purpose with your too much related trademark infringing material. Basically, you need to be actively phishing to get sued in Europe.

Next thing you know they'll want trademarks on letters or digits.

As far as I know, in the USA you can't trademark, copyright or patent a typeface, only its name and the actual file holding the data.
(Otherwise the people holding the Imaginary-Property rights of most fonts would basically control press, or force independent publishers to use "wing ding" to print their work).
Thus the name "Times new roman" is trademarked, the files containing those fonts for Microsoft Windows have a special license, but that doesn't stop Linux distribution to provide their own set of similar fonts (Thorndale, BitStream & DejaVu Serif, FreeSerif, Nimbus Roman, Linux Libertine, etc.) which looks very much like the original fonts.

There's a limited number of colors, letters, and digits.

Digits: And some people have used this reasoning applying it to computer code. After all, computer code is a big stream of binary digits. Back then a team of mathematicians used this idea to publish a number derived from a DeCSS binary with interesting mathematical properties.

Choosing one of those and expecting it to be unique is stupid.

It's not exactly that T-Mobile "owns a color".
The way trademark law functions, is that T-Mobile design a peculiar logo : fonts, colors, shape etc.
They trade mark that logo, and once they secure the trademark, they can sue whoever might purposefully try to use the same or almost the same logo to trick users into confusing the companies.

So what they are claiming against engadget isn't "You can't use this color, this color is mine".
What they are claiming is "Your logo looks too much like ours because of the color, and your tricking our customer into thinking your website is ours". (more details on this november post [engadget.com])
And that will be hard to prove on a european court because one sells mobile service whereas the other only publishes tech news and reviews. Thus, the websites are hard to confuse. And even if some idiot managed to confuse them, Deutsche Telekom wouldn't be losing any money, as engadget doesn't sell competing products, nor any other product at all.

Re:A throwback to the Roman Empire?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Gah

[wicka]

First off, it's a specific shade of magenta and in a specific industry; they can't just go around yelling at everyone to stop using it. A good example would be if FedEx painted all their trucks UPS brown. I don't think a single person would disagree that that is massive trademark infringement. I think T-Mobile realizes that they have almost no chance of this claim holding up in court, which is why their letter was so nice; they were basically just asking Engadget to do them a favor and stopping using their color on their mobile site. Engadget, instead of just doing it, or even saying, "you can't do anything, we're not changing it," decided to be spiteful little douchebags. Look at their site now: they've recreated the T-Mobile logo, in magenta, in their site's logo. They've gone from barely trademark infringement, to undeniable and flagrant trademark infringement. I hope they get their pants sued off, or at least the threat of, so next time they'll act like adults and not angry 12 year olds.

My wife had a good question....

[Jason Levine]

Upon hearing this news story, my wife had a good question: Does this mean they're going to sue Crayola?

Re:A throwback to the Roman Empire?

[budgenator]

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!

It's not even the same color...

[Chysn]

T-Mobile magenta: e2 00 74
Engadget magenta: ec 00 8c

Not. Even. Close.

Re:This is an April Fool's joke.

[networkBoy]

Just to be fair:
you can register a trademark on a color(pantone)/font face and especially the combination of the two...
so it is plausible.
We all can assume that grammatical errors can happen.
so it is still plausible.
We all know how *reasonable* lawyers are, and to that end the elimination of the use of a color seems perfectly reasonable.
so it is still plausible.
BUT the letter was awfully nice compared to the Normal type of C&D [farmersreallysucks.com] but not as enlightened as this one [farmersreallysucks.com].
So it is no longer plausible and I (and Occam's razor) concur. April fools.
-nB

Re:ROFL

[Blikkie]

I wish it were a joke. When this came into the Dutch news 6 months ago or something, some people started the Free Magenta [freemagenta.nl] movement. T-mobile NL claimed that they were ordered to claim the colour in Dutch copyright by Deutsche Telecom AG.