this video was made possible by dashlane men and your passwords securely with
dashlane for free at dashing calm h AI hey this is a nice shade of turquoise
ish blue isn't it it'd be nice to make a ping-pong paddle or something with it
wouldn't it well too bad because it's one of the most protected colors out
there and you can't there are actually a lot of things you can own such as bees
beats Pete's tweed Mead meat boats boats goats gates Gators gutters butter
putters cookers Cougars coolers and colors now that might come as a surprise
to you goats are animals of incredible power that aren't subject to human
institution such as ownership but legally according to people laws you can
own a goat just as much as you could own a color to this you could say what or
huh or hmm because something so tangible and yet abstract as color has to
automatically be public domain right I mean how can someone own a color let's
take that first color as an example by itself it is a mere color but sprinkle a
little meaning into it make the public mentally connect this shade to a company
and you may have just formed the basis of legally taking ownership of it in
1985 insulation and roofing company owns Corning won the first case in the United
States allowing a company to trademark a color when they ruled that this special
shade of pink that they use for their insulation was unique to them and so
other competitors couldn't use it at all let's read some words the american legal
definition of a trademark is a word phrase symbol and/or design that
identifies and distinguishes the source of the goods of one party from those of
others so essentially if a word phrase symbol and/or design is unique and
widely identifiable as linked to a company it has the case to be a
trademark the key word in those words is design since a color can be a design and
therefore a color can be a trademark there's a big exception now the US
Supreme Court says that a trademark can be a single color as long as that color
is not functional what does that mean that means the color can't do a thing
for example the government has denied trademark applications from phone
companies wanting to protect their easily identifiable orange or yellow
telephone booths in those cases the colors function is to make the booths
easy to spot and so they can't be trademarked however if those phone
companies uniquely used a shade of teal or purple or some other low tier color
and they were well known for their branding being in that shade they'd have
a more compelling case the court stands on trademarking colors is that the color
has to meet the purpose of identifying the source of the product it has to be
widely linked to the company there are no plenty of legally recognized and
registered color trademarks including the tiffany blue shown at the beginning
Barbie pink Home Depot Orange target red and UPS Brown these companies are well
known for their branding using these unique colors and so they have been
granted trademarks for these exact colors now I just showed those
copyrighted colors in this video which is a commercial endeavor thanks to those
sweet sponsorship dollars so am I about to spend the next few months in jail
maybe but not for this in fact some colors have multiple valid trademarks
from completely different companies occurring simultaneously how is that
possible because the trademarks are also for totally different things for example
these two virtually indistinguishable shades of red are both trademarked this
one by fashion designer Christian Louboutin and this one by a department
store Target Christian Louboutin has the trademark for the use in shoe design
whereas Target has the trademark for use in department stores trademarks cover
design in specific instances so that competing or similar products don't
intersect on design let's take the example of one of the world's most
iconic and beloved logos ours the yellow text with purple background is pretty
indicative of this show when you see that at the beginning you know you're
about to watch a dumpster fire with a bit of information and bad humor thrown
in if we were considering switching it up we could maybe use coke red as our
main color or maybe even t-mobile magenta and nobody could say a thing
about it because we don't sell soda or phones we aren't competing in a similar
market so there's no basis for trademark infringement
however if another video series in a similar space where she used the
signature half as interesting yellow purple duo in their logo or bumpers and
they came out looking like ours we would have legal grounds to say that they are
violating our trademark there is therefore a reasonable legal basis to
say that I the owner of half is interesting owned this color at least
for use in online video production much like Cheesecake factories trademarks
just exist whether you want them or not you can register them but you don't have
to for them to be legally enforceable you just have to have that defined
branding in the public consciousness have your case in places like the United
States unlike copyright as long as you use it
a trademark will never expire so in summary if you want to own a color all
you have to do is create a company market is in a way that the public
connects a colors your brand and it's yours back in 1996 I actually started a
company I called it net films we put films on the internet and we had this
great bold red branding that we managed to get a registered trademark for but
eventually I forgot the company password and I couldn't figure out how to reset
it so we just shut down while there could be some embellishments in that
story what's not one is that I would have been saved if only dashlane had
existed then luckily it does now so I will never lose the password for my next
business venture where I put radio on the Internet
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