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Businesses Advertising The Courts

T-Mobile Says It Owns Exclusive Rights To the Color Magenta (adage.com) 150

Posted by BeauHD from the showing-their-true-colors dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from AdAge: Startup insurance provider Lemonade is trying to make the best of a sour situation after T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom claimed it owns the exclusive rights to the color magenta. New York-based Lemonade is a 3-year-old company that lives completely online and mostly focuses on homeowners and renter's insurance. The company uses a similar color to magenta -- it says it's "pink" -- in its marketing materials and its website. But Lemonade was told by German courts that it must cease using its color after launching its services in that country, which is also home to T-Mobile owner Deutsche Telekom. Although the ruling only applies in Germany, Lemonade says it fears the decision will set a precedent and expand to other jurisdictions such as the U.S. or Europe.

"If some brainiac at Deutsche Telekom had invented the color, their possessiveness would make sense," Daniel Schreiber, CEO and co-founder of Lemonade, said in a statement. "Absent that, the company's actions just smack of corporate bully tactics, where legions of lawyers attempt to hog natural resources -- in this case a primary color -- that rightfully belong to everyone." A spokesman for Deutsche Telekom confirmed that it "asked the insurance company Lemonade to stop using the color magenta in the German market," while adding that the "T" in "Deutsche Telekom" is registered to the brand. "Deutsche Telekom respects everyone's trademark rights but expects others to do the same," the spokesman said in an emailed statement to Ad Age. The report says Lemonade has complied with the ruling by removing its pink color from marketing materials in Germany. It's also trying to open up a larger discussion on the legal matter by using the hashtag "#FreeThePink," although it's gained little traction thus far.

Lemonade also filed a motion today with the European Union Intellectual Property Office, or EUIPO, to invalidate Deutsche Telekom's magenta trademark, and they released a color chart with which it asserts are the hues at issue.
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T-Mobile Says It Owns Exclusive Rights To the Color Magenta More

T-Mobile Says It Owns Exclusive Rights To the Color Magenta

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  • Color blind guy here (Score:5, Funny)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @06:16PM (#59384784)
    and I demand all companies stop using the color Grey, which I have trademarked.

    • And never forget what brown can do for you [youtube.com], as well!

    • Re:Color blind guy here (Score:4, Interesting)

      by lgw ( 121541 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @07:17PM (#59384998) Journal

      The best part is that "magenta" isn't an actual color, from a physics perspective. It's a trick of human neural wiring. When the eye registers a mix of red and blue, our vision wetware doesn't know what to do with that (it certainly wasn't a color seen during the evolutionary course of the eye and vision center) , so it just makes something up. Aliens would be very confused by 4-color printing.

      Speaking of which, T-Mobil should sue everyone who uses 4-color printing for any use of Magenta. It would be no more absurd than inkjet ink is in general.

      (Personally, I can tell the difference between violet and magenta, but color experts would be appalled by my indifference).

      • "Magenta" is one of the mixtures of colors that comes from the Sun.

      • Re: Color blind guy here (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Miamicanes ( 730264 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @01:08AM (#59385756)

        Strictly speaking, true spectral violet is outside the gamut of both RGB and CMYK colorspace. Most people THINK "violet" == "purple" (mixture of red + blue) because they've never directly seen the two side by side.

        Just about the only place true spectral violet CAN be readily observed in daily life is in old (pre-1900s) stained glass windows, and SOME car paints(*). Maybe, MAYBE some exotic LEDs (Yuji's 98-CRI LED lights uses phosphors excited by violet light, vs the blue phosphors used by most "white" LED lights).

        This is why old stained glass has "mysterious" dim violet hues. At first glance, they look "purple", but when further scrutinized, it sinks in that it's different in subtle ways most people lack the color terminology to describe. Modern stained glass has intense "purple" (compared to the dim violet found in old stained glass), but when you see it in person, it's *not* quite the same hue, even though most people can't quite put their finger on the precise reason *why*.

        That said, it's probably a good thing intense spectral violet light is rarely seen directly. From what I've read, intense spectral violet light is somewhat harmful. Not as bad as "UV", but not as (mostly) harmless as green & red, either. Intense spectral blue isn't quite 100% safe, either (as in, if you spent lots of time under 10,000-lux spectral blue light, at some point it would start acting like weak UV... spectral violet would be about 2-4x as bad as blue).

        ---

        (*) Car paint IS different from "normal" paint, and often uses expensive, exotic pigments. This is part of what gives SOME cars their radical color shifts as lighting changes, and why a car repainted with "economy" paint will NEVER look the same as the manufacturer's exotic paint.

        From what I've read, the effect is even MORE pronounced for viewers with color vision anomalies or defects... cheap paints use CMYK-based pigment, which artificially constricts the gamut visible to viewers with nonstandard color perception.

        The truth is, someone who's deuteranomalous or protanomalous sees the full spectrum of hues, just like anyone else with trichromatic color perception... but images reproduced as RGB or CMYK have big chunks of the spectrum between green & red collapse into muddy brown because a huge chunk of the color spectrum seen by anomalous trichromats lies outside the gamut of CIE-RGB and CMYK process color.

        Put another way... someone with deuteranomaly or protanomaly CAN see "true yellow" (the hue precisely halfway between "green" and "red")... but THEIR "true yellow" can't be properly reproduced on a RGB monitor unless they jack up the green or red intensity (and make everyone ELSE annoyed), because the monitor's green or red phosphors aren't quite centered on the same wavelengths as THEIR medium or long-wave cones.

        The next frontier of HDTV will be "RYGB" color... the addition of a fourth pure hue (greenish-yellow) between red & green that aligns with the wavelength of "deutan yellow". For ~91% of people, it won't make any visible difference... but for anomalous trichromats (and tetrachromatic women), it will be a *profound* improvement. For the first time, people with CVDs won't have everything on a monitor collapse into muddy brown... and they'll be able to see colors on the monitor that look "right" without having to mess with the green or red intensity (because the "yellow" subpixels will be in the right place to directly stimulate THEIR green or red cone cells).

        RYGB monitors won't help (directly) with TV, because cameras & the entire video workflow is so built around RGB, adding a fourth primary will take decades... but at least it would allow SYNTHETIC video (ie, videogames & raytraced eye candy) to adopt it fairly easily. The hardest part would be getting the RYGB color values right. To someone with "normal" color vision, there's a whole slew of RYGB values that would look identical to a given RGB triad... but only ONE would look precisely right to someone with anomalous trichromacy (or a tet

        • Incidentally, even protanopes & deuteranopes have a very limited sense of trichromatic color perception under precisely the right lab conditions... it's just that even under the most extreme, exaggerated lab conditions, the difference between "purest, greenest green" and "purest, reddest red" (actually, both hues of yellow-green ~2nm apart) is more subtle than the difference between "beige, with a subtle hint of pink" and "beige, with a subtle hint of orange" to someone with normal color perception(*).

          I

        • In that novel you just wrote, you list the "only" (natural?) places where purple can be observer, and only list artificial sources.

          When in nature, there are many purple things. Flowers, to name the brually obvious. But snails too, which we used to extract the dye from!

        • The next frontier of HDTV will be "RYGB" color... the addition of a fourth pure hue (greenish-yellow) between red & green that aligns with the wavelength of "deutan yellow".

          Didn't Sharp try adding "Quattron" yellow [wikipedia.org] to the panels for its Aquos TVs?

          ~10% of the population isn't a majority... but we're still talking about a global market as big as the entire US or EU.

          But I imagine that most of this market lives in a country where most people can't afford an expensive TV, such as a country whose currency has a low exchange rate with the euro or US dollar.

          • Quattron was a marketing gimmick. The 'yellow' subpixel couldn't be independently addressed, and (from the standpoint of someone with a CVD) might as well have been a random value that happened to be RGB-metameric.

            Put another way, the panel itself was potentially a step in the right direction, but the lack of a way to feed it RYGB data directly rendered it useless for that purpose. It was like a TV with a "120hz" panel that can only take 60hz input... possibly a small improvement insofar as processing that

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jrumney ( 197329 )

      Deutsche Telekom actually has grey as well. From EUIPO registration 000212753: Description: Colour Magenta, grey.

      But that is only valid for 38 Telecommunications Services, and 42 Projecting and planning services related to equipment for telecommunications. Maybe the local German registration is wider, otherwise I do not see how a court ruled that an insurance company was in violation.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by jrumney ( 197329 )

        Interestingly, there are two colour trademarks held by Deutsche Telekom. One is for the colour magenta, which Lemonade has filed to cancel on the basis "The marks is devoid of any distinctive character and has thus been registered contrary to Art. 7(1)(b) EUTMR. Detailed statements in support of the motion are attached.". The other is for the colours magenta and grey (which looks like the shade of grey you would get if you printed the T-mobile magenta in black and white). This one seems to have escaped Lem

    • and I demand all companies stop using the color Grey, which I have trademarked.

      And? Show us the trademark. Show us the business you built around it. Show us the colour scheme used throughout your company. Show us you defended the trademark continuously.

      Trademarks based around colour are nothing new, they are actually quite common. What is interesting here is that Lemonade's defence didn't hold up in court (they aren't using the trademarked colours).

    • Also, all CMYK inkjet cartridges are in violation and must be pulled unless they have been co-licensed with SCO ^H^H^H Deutsche Telekom

  • No company can use the letter E, capital or lowercase, in any promotional instance.

    I also own all the other letters except for T. You can use T with permission from T-Mobile.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Sesame Street will then go bankrupt and end up on the street....oh, wait

      • Sesame Street will then go bankrupt and end up on the street....oh, wait

        Sounds nice. Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by tepples ( 727027 )

          Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?

          Today's navigation is brought to you by the letters H, B, O and the number 14.99.

    • I own white, as we use it as a background on our marketing material. Also since White also has all the colors in it we need to check with our German lawyers to see if we can claim all colors.

      • I only use the color black in my marketing material. Since it does not reflect any color you are claiming your lawsuit should be immediately dismissed or expect a counter lawsuit for infringing my my patent of the use of spaces between letters to more easily distinguish between words.

      • I own white, as we use it as a background on our marketing material. Also since White also has all the colors in it we need to check with our German lawyers to see if we can claim all colors.

        Since white includes all colors, including magenta, you'll be hearing from the Germans about your misappropriation of a color they own to make your "white".....

        • Wait until you read about my amazing technology that uses only the colors red, green and blue to make something that looks white.

          No need for Magenta.

  • Not even the same shade (Score:5, Informative)

    by jrumney ( 197329 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @06:24PM (#59384814)

    Even if T-mobile had trademarked a specific color code, it would still be ridiculous, but the color Lemonade is using is not even the same shade of magenta. We cannot allow corporations to grab such large swathes of the public domain and use legal bully tactics to keep it for themselves.

    • Re:Not even the same shade (Score:4, Funny)

      by PPH ( 736903 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @07:04PM (#59384956)

      What if my PC only supports 4 bit colors?

    • We cannot allow corporations to grab such large swathes of the public domain

      We don't unless you are German.

      Other countries don't allow broad trademarks on colors. In America, T-Mobile may be able to get a trademark on magenta "in mobile telecom," but it would not apply to other industries such as insurance.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by henni16 ( 586412 )

        In America, T-Mobile may be able to get a trademark on magenta "in mobile telecom," but it would not apply to other industries such as insurance.

        Difficulty: This insurance company's stick is apparently that it's entirely mobile app based.
        They're mainly promoting their app, using pictures of phone screens and the same color scheme as T-Mobile.

        Heck, Uber's lawyers would probably argue that that insurance company is really a mobile tech company because its product is an app to buy and handle insurance services. ;-)

      • We are wondering how they got that trademark in the first place too.

        Not much though. They are infamous for being in the same old boys club as our leading parties.

    • Not to mention their website uses three different fonts that don't mix well. And the various objects are imbalanced. It's a good attempt at design, with some clever animation and nice shadows, but doesn't come together as a coherent whole.

    • Even if T-mobile had trademarked a specific color code

      They have.

      it would still be ridiculous

      It's not and has plenty of prior art. Google Pantone 1837.

      We cannot allow corporations to grab such large swathes of the public domain and use legal bully tactics to keep it for themselves.

      No. We cannot allow wide legal interpretation of that domain. There's nothing wrong with trademarking a colour, there's everything wrong with going after a company who is not a competitor and not even using the same colour.

      The courts here erred, but the fundamentals behind the trademark are just fine.

      • How's that corporate bootleather taste?

        • How's that corporate bootleather taste?

          Wouldn't know, I wear boots on my feet. If you're eating them then you're doing it wrong.

          What has my comment got to do with defending corporations anyway. Are you incapable of doing an impartial legal analysis? Are you simply an anarchist proposing to tear down trademarks? Or do you fail at reading comprehension?

  • I used to be a T-Mobile customer, but one day my signal at home went to crap, so they clearly moved a sector. I complained, but they never moved it back.

    This is ten times douchier than that, though. I hope they get hit with ransomware.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SeaFox ( 739806 )

      I used to be a T-Mobile customer, but one day my signal at home went to crap...

      Same thing happened to me once.
      Turns out it was my phone. I bought a used handset the exact same model as the one I had, moved my SIM over, and found the reception was fine.

  • Ever Hear Of Pantone... (Score:3)

    by Thelasko ( 1196535 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @06:26PM (#59384826) Journal
    ...they claim ownership of lots of colors. [wikipedia.org]

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

      Ever Hear Of Pantone... ...they claim ownership of lots of colors.

      Ever hear of not starting a comment in the subject line?

      Anyway, you are completely wrong. They don't claim ownership of any colors. They claim ownership of their compilation of listings of colors. If you want to use Pantone color lists in an application, you have to license them. But all the colors in rgb.txt appear in Pantone listings, and you don't have to pay anything to use that list, or those colors.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )

      they claim they own the coloring system/names.
      however they will let you use the color itself.

      now as to deutsche telekom.. is the color the same rgb value on their website or not? what if they add every 5th pixel to be white or whatever?

  • The colour purple (Score:4, Informative)

    by martinX ( 672498 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @06:28PM (#59384832)

    Even Cadbury had trouble holding on to a specific colour in their own market. Linky [thedrum.com]

  • ...and said it was suing over the color black.

  • Yellow, anyone? (Score:3)

    by magarity ( 164372 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @06:28PM (#59384836)

    "If some brainiac at Deutsche Telekom had invented the color, their possessiveness would make sense," Daniel Schreiber, CEO and co-founder of Lemonade, said in a statement

    Well, Daniel, why did some Brainiac at a company called Lemonade pick magenta instead of yellow for the corporate logo?

  • DT uses "Magenta" word as a brand as well. T-Mobile Austria was recently rebranded to Magenta Telekom, services in various T-Mobile countries (including T-Mobile USA) are called "Magenta".
    https://www.telekom.com/en/com... [telekom.com]

    I suspect that this could have been the base for somebody at DT to decide on preventive action.

    As for the hue - while for many these two hues are the same (except if shown next to each other) they seem to be considered different for formal purposes.

    This still seems to be a clearer case than

  • Color Trademarks are good (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dallas May ( 4891515 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @06:30PM (#59384846)

    Trademarking a color is fine, so long as it's within a particular industry. ATT has trademarked their orange. Verizon has trademarked their red. Sprint shouldn't be able to switch their logo to orange or red in an attempt to draw confusion in the market and steal customers. Their colors are definitely a recognizable part of their brand and marketing. That's fine.

    But going after another company that is not competing in your market is just weird. No one shopping for a new cell phone plan is going to accidentally buy insurance. This is dumb and should be invalidated.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by zmooc ( 33175 )

      Plot twist: T-Mobile IS an insurance provider; they sell phone insurance. Including the phone and the subscription if you want to. Selling people insurance by accident is exactly what they do.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by henni16 ( 586412 )
      That insurance company seems to offer insurance (only) by phone app, so their ads heavily feature phones and the same color scheme as T-Mobile.
      Example [ytimg.com]
      While they're selling insurance, they're marketing a phone app, which is probably why/where they're clashing with T-Mobile's trademarks.
    • What happens when an industry has enough companies such that the entire spectrum is claimed? Sorry, Joe's Diner, the whole visible spectrum is used by other restaurants, if you hurry you can still register infra red.

      • Well, considering a spectrum is by definition literally infinite in three dimensions (hue, lightness, and saturation) that would be impossible.

        However, you make a good point. In the case at hand, T-Mo trademarked a very particular shade of magenta, but then in court claimed ownership of a wide variety of shades that weren't claimed in the trademark filing. So the question then becomes "How close is too close?"

    • > ATT has trademarked their orange

      AT&T has always 'had' blue from Ma Bell days.

      https://www.underconsideration... [underconsideration.com]

      When did they also claim orange? What are we to do about more than seven phone companieif they each get exclusive access to two or more colors? This is lunacy.

  • I wonder if I can violate their copyright if I grip my balls tightly enough.

  • 2003 called (Score:3)

    by bickerdyke ( 670000 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @06:34PM (#59384864)

    2003 called. They want their news back: https://www.handelsblatt.com/u... [handelsblatt.com]

  • I own the rights to the letter "E" $0.0005 per use!

  • The should shut up and start making sane software.
    Magenta TV Safari plugin is a complete FuckUp on OS X.

    TLDR; They are modifying Max OS /usr/sbin/ - binaries and are installing a self signed certificates in the OS X Keychain

    AND....
    # root ca key
    openssl genrsa -passout pass:Huawei123 -out ca.key 2048

    No Joke ..
    see https://twitter.com/nurtext/st... [twitter.com]

    it's german, but you'll get it.

  • So what German law is it exactly that allows a company to "own" a color and how did they determine that the two colors are identical? If they're two different Pantone colors how can the court say they're the same?

  • I think it's clear that Dr. Evil is the CEO of T-mobile. No one else would conjure such an insane plan and take it all the way to court.

    • My father would womanize; he would drink; he would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark.

  • T-Mobile's claims are reasonable (Score:3)

    by henni16 ( 586412 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @06:57PM (#59384928)
    Trademarks are limited in scope;
    I didn't see how Telekom/T-Mobile and an insurance company would clash in that regard and since I had never heard of Lemonade insurance before, I did a quick Google search.

    Apparently Lemonade's product is an insurance smartphone app.
    If you look at the Google image results, their ads usually feature a giant smartphone and use pink as the only non-grayscale color, which makes it stand out a lot.

    If T-Mobile holds trademarks for all kinds of cellphone-related crap making heavy use of magenta, I'm not surprised that they had a problem with an app's ads looking like this:
    https://i.ytimg.com/vi/flSLI2JmWVE/default.jpg [ytimg.com]
    That ad could easily be mistaken for an ad or an app endorsed by T-Mobile.

  • T-Mobile Says It Owns Exclusive Rights To the Color Magenta

    Well *I* say I own the Exclusive Right to the name T-Mobile.

    Just because Someone Says Something doesn't Make It So (unless you're JLP.)

    Now if by Hook, Crook, or Politician I can get everyone to AGREE to that -- well then, THAT's a fish of a different color. "The Knights that Say Ni" may soon become "The Pirates that say #FF00FF."

    Hints:
    JLP [wikipedia.org]
    Hook [wikipedia.org]
    Fishes [phrases.org.uk]
    Magenta, FOOF! [colorhexa.com]
    Ni!!! [wikipedia.org]
    Yo Ho Ho! [piratevoyages.com]

  • In 1970 Eastman Kodak Company claimed that it owned a particular shade of the color Yellow and successfully sued [justia.com] Fotomat for infringement.

  • prior art: fuchsine and roseine, which have long since fallen into the public domain. (see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] )

  • Yves Klein took initial steps to patent the International Klein Blue (IKB) [wikipedia.org] shade but never followed through. Though he did patent the method of using naked women's bodies as brushes, with which they painted in IKB.

    The artist Anish Kapoor has exclusive rights [theguardian.com] to use the Vantablack shade of the color black.

  • Deere & Company owns several registered marks covering its green and yellow color scheme, so althopugh I think it's wrong, I wouldn't be surprised if T-Mobile gets to "own" magenta.

    Caterpillar's current logo originated in 1931 , and the yellow color is now trademarked by the company, along with its logo design.

  • Sorry, Panatone owns ALL colors. Checkmate!
  • ..should all sue T-Mobile, then, because they all make color printers which rely on magenta.

  • I feel weird walking into those T-Mobile stores which are decorated in all pink. It brings back memories of my semi-rural junior high days where groups of students beat the crap out of you for walking into "gay" stores or hanging out with any person or object that "looked gay". Yes, it was that bad, and it leaves a lasting impression such that walking into their pink stores automatically triggers a fight-or-flight reflex. (I'm not gay, by the way.)

    One learned via bruises to avoid anything that "looked gay"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by geekoid ( 135745 )

      "(I'm not gay, by the way.)"
      completely irrelevant to your tragic story, and specifically pointing it out only make you look like you think big gay is bad.
      Probably unintentional, but that's how it reads.

      Your experience is in line with evangelical mentality, and they have been getting worse.

  • But it may have prior art.

  • I was an engineer at Sanders in NH when it was purchased by BAE, and as part of our orientation they made a huge deal about the specific color of red used in the company logo. They claimed ownership of that specific red and had both print and electronic standards used to judge it against in presentations and press releases. No idea if it was actually true, and I'm not aware of them suing or threatening to sue anyone to enforce it. Of course, I wouldn't have heard about this case either if I hadn't seen i

  • CMYK (Score:2)

    by gtvr ( 1702650 )
    Aren't color inkjet printer inks Cyan Magenta Yellow Black? HP and Epson had better watch out.

  • Beceause #freethepink sounds like an anti underwear movement.

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