News FeedT-Mobile owns the color Magenta
While reading the article “Color: The Next Limited Resource?” on Six Revisions, I found the subject of brands buying and claiming a colour as theirs, a scary and interesting thought. T-mobile being the most active and controversial story, I thought I would look into it a bit more.
So what are the facts?
- T-Mobile (Deutsche Telekom) have trademarked the colour magenta.
- T-mobile can only trademark in the industry sector that they are registered in, so T-Mobile has trademarked the colour magenta in telecommunications
They have been enforcing this in the last few years by suing companies like book-on-demand publisher, and most recently, web magazine blog Engadget Mobile.
On one side it's a scary thought that you could have things like trademarks to consider when choosing colour for design. On the other side I can understand the reasoning from large companies. For major branding and logo colours, colour is powerful thing. You do associate certain colours within certain industries to specific companies. So why would competing companies choose a similar colour, except to associate themselves with the bigger company? If that is the case then I could understand why a company would use the trademarked colour as a legal case.
The problem here is that T-mobile has sued two companies that are not in direct competition with them and I feel the reasoning behind the two cases is not design but money.
Published 12.11.09
Software Consulting
I think you will find that the color is associated with a large well established firm and using that color can drive the sales of a smaller less known company, not associated with the large company, because a customer will think that the small one is connected with the other. This type of marketing is used often with name knock offs. It is one of those grey areas that a coy marketer will use to drive sales on the branding of another. I suspect that T-Mobile does not want the others to besmirch their good name (ok that might have been a reach) and have sued to stop use of that color. Thanks for the post.