T-Mobile demand Lemonade to stop using the color magenta
thehustle.co
thehustle.co
However many things have to be considered from the consumers perspective. Is there likely confusion? Is one of the main things courts are supposed to consider.
But outside of their market, they should have no say on who uses that color.
To add even more color to the kerfuffle, Lemonade filed a motion yesterday with the European intellectual property office to loosen Deutsche’s legal vice-grip on the color, and has petitioned to remove DT’s color-rights on magenta in the insurance sector.
The problem is, T-Mobile actually does offer insurance on services like cybersecurity and tech-gadget protection policies, which could add a touch of gray to the magenta dispute.Without code blocks:
> To add even more color to the kerfuffle, Lemonade filed a motion yesterday with the European intellectual property office to loosen Deutsche’s legal vice-grip on the color, and has petitioned to remove DT’s color-rights on magenta in the insurance sector.
> The problem is, T-Mobile actually does offer insurance on services like cybersecurity and tech-gadget protection policies, which could add a touch of gray to the magenta dispute.
Do you indent your code? Or are the curly braces enough?
Back to quotes, for multiple paragraphs, I just add a ">" to the start of each paragraph.
I just use a carrot and make it italics, easy to see.
Though it should be:
> "It doesn’t indent"
• https://getitwriteonline.com/articles/titles-italics-or-quot...
• https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/14876/use-quotat...
I'm pretty sure this is the reason people try to use code blocks for quotes—because they want it indented.
That’s not what happens on mobile.
Depends on how you, um, use the carrot. I'd recommend eating it, but there are many other ways it could bring joy.
In the context of quoting, using a caret (this symbol: ^) is not common, with the exception of saying THIS^.
The ">" symbol is officially known as the "greater-than sign"[1]. That's the one you probably meant.
</typography nerd mode>
Way to go Siemens
T-Mobile demand Lemonade stop using the color magenta
T-Mobile demand that Lemonade stop using the color magenta
(Lemonade is #ff0083, while T-Mobile is #e20074. Comparison here: https://www.colorcombos.com/combotester.html?color0=e20074&c...)
I think that in Lemonade german site, they changed the color to a darker pink (probably until the issue with T-mobile is finished)
But fuck T-Mobile though. Magenta is a primary color in most types of print. That they can somehow stop other people from using it is bullshit.
Lots of companies trademark their brand colors. UPS has a particular shade of brown.
There are others, including 3M, Barbie pink, the yellow of a Wiffle Ball bat, and Cadbury purple.
Where's the line then?
Amusingly I have 2 LCD monitors here, an acer and a samsung, and when I put Tmobile on the Samsung and Lemonade on the Acer, the colors look functionally identical to the naked eye.
The laws are made by the lawmakers (congress, parliaments, etc.)
Justice is there as the supreme/ultimate power to resolve issues between parties. We can't go around smashing heads because "my colour/your colour". When two parties have an issue that cannot be resolved amicably (I don't mean crimes), then Justice gets to say the final word. We live in a civilized world.
If you can trademark a name as simple as "apple", and if you can trademark an icon as simple as 4 squares of identical size and shape next to another (windows/microsoft), then it becomes quite obvious that colors are treated the same.
In the end, trademark laws as a whole will have to be reformed, but this is just a natural consequence of the current laws.
So as I said, unless you sub-divide the insurance industry on arbitrary lines, they are both selling insurance to the consumer. Claiming that because it is only "extended warranties" (which it isn't anyway) isn't really a legal argument for trademark law. We're talking about markets here, they're both in the insurance market regardless of how you frame it.
Does anyone know whether T-Mobile sell THEIR insurance or they act as brokers selling someone else's insurance (e.g. Allianz, AXA, etc.)?
I also wonder the % of revenue of T-Mobile from insurance Vs their other business lines.
(I don't really wonder)
T-Mobile does the same. So in that way they're no different than any other type of consumer insurance company.
In this case, if you can't buy phone insurance (the product you would buy from T-Mobile) from Lemonade, they are not competitors.
I mean we are actually discussing “T-Mobile isn’t a mobile carrier, they’re an insurance company”.
Does it? Because that seems like nonsense.
You can't trademark the entire word "apple" you can trademark the the word apple within a set of industries. You can't start a computer/isp/copy machine company called apple, but you definitely can start a woodworking shop called apple.
Imagine if companies could reserve an entire letter. All words beginning with that letter would belong to them.
https://www.smh.com.au/technology/apples-future-wont-be-brou...
By that logic, Google is literally using the Fuchsia color #FF00FF for Fuchsia OS which is literally classed a Magenta as the web color!
T-Mobile, I dare you to sue Google.
> The problem is, T-Mobile actually does offer insurance on services like cybersecurity and tech-gadget protection policies, which could add a touch of gray to the magenta dispute.
Good on Lemonade for fighting it. But something is really wrong with the world when claims like Deutsche Telekom’s are taken seriously in the first place.
This is almost like the “illegal number” involved in decss years ago. Here’s the color: #e20074
I'm not saying I agree that colors should be trademarked, just that it's fairly common practice.
Is it only goodwill that is keeping Crayola from suing everyone? No one ought to have the right to prevent others from using a color of all things.
It’s like kindergarten all over again... “That’s my crayon! You give it back!”
T-Mobile is in the telecom business, and Lemonade is in the residential insurance business. T-Mobile should not be trying to take-down a company that is not in their competitive space for using the same color on their website.
I am not a lawyer, but I have dealt with this at work. This is not legal advice.
https://www.sparkfun.com/news/1430
Apparently Fluke "allowed" SparkFun to distribute the multi-meters in question to educational and charitable organizations, rather than just destroying them. I guess that's as close to a nice resolve as you can get without Fluke just completely dropping their action.
I wonder if they would consider the idea of painting them in a different colour...
In this instance, a magenta banner is associated with a company that offers insurance products - and another company is offering insurance products and using a magenta banner in their branding. I think it's actually a fair question whether that crosses a line.
With Trademark law, companies have to protect their trademarks, or risk losing their trademark.
Pretty standard in the US.
To me, T-mobile's mark is the color and the logo. But pink alone does not scream "T-mobile" to me.
>
> The short answer is “No,” a trademark owner does not have to sue every single infringer, and the failure to do so in an isolated case of infringement will likely not result in abandonment.
https://www.dbllawyers.com/can-lose-trademark-rights-dont-su...
> However, the failure to take action in the face of widespread infringement could significantly impact a mark owner’s rights.
> It is for this reason that many larger companies that invest heavily in their trademark portfolios err on the side of caution in pursuing infringers.
This reads like a risk to me.
EDIT: If you wanted an "ivory" white to build a brand around... that would be allowed as a trademark of course. But it would consistently be that "ivory white" color that you picked as a trademark, and nothing else.
The "damages" would be the resale value of those houses combined.
Only if those houses are in the same industry as your trademark. You can paint your house UPS-brown and they won't be able to sue unless you were using it as a place of business.
Case in point: Lake McDonald Lodge (https://www.yelp.com/biz/lake-mcdonald-lodge-west-glacier) can exist because its in a totally different business than McDonald's fast food.
Yeah, "McDonald" is trademarked, but trademark is very restrictive over what you can sue over.
----------
So your hypothetical "Ivory" trademark will only apply in the industry that you've registered the trademark under. You can't just sue private houses for using your color.
EDIT: Furthermore, to obtain a "Colormark" trademark, you need to prove that the color has secondary meaning to your particular business. Ex: Fedex-brown is a trademark because Fedex is using that particular brown to color their trucks and employee uniforms, and applies it consistently across their enterprise.
It would be unfair if I were to start my own rival shipping company using a similar color uniform as Fedex. I'd have to use blue-uniforms or green-uniforms instead.
--------
EDIT: As an example: General Mills was unable to trademark "Yellow" as a trademark on Cheerios cereal, because yellow was used on too many cereal boxes already and clearly wasn't a color that people associated with General Mills.
The reason for trademarks is simple: branding. Since there are a near infinite number of colors available (for example: #e21088 should be different enough to not violate trademark), different groups can claim colors of their own (if they wish to trademark a certain color).
Catch-phrases, simple words ("Taste the Rainbow" or "They're more than Good, they're Great"), or even names (Mario) can be trademarked.
Furthermore, Trademarks only apply within the industry. I can use FedEx-brown so long as I don't compete against FedEx.
NATO for small-businesses and startups.
Nevermind that owning the exclusive rights to use a particular colour in this way is absurd.
The techcrunch article is a bit more informative -- https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/04/lemonade-gets-a-nastygram-...
In this case, I don't think a typical consumer would see brand confusion, which is really the benchmark for trademark enforcement usually.
For any trademark of color T(represented as a vector in RGB colorspace), the chance that a brand using color C can be successfully sued is equal to 1-k*||T-C||, where k is lesser than 1 divided by the maximum distance between any two points in RGB colorspace. Find the minimum number of trademarks needed so that for any color the chance of successfully suing is greater than or equal to P.
Here it's T-Mobile (tech) suing Lemonade (music) over a color.
FWIW I found this website useful when deciding on complementary colors; you can see how other companies have solved combinations.
... and here's what they have for T-mobile (no listing for lemonade)
edit - sorry, mistake, I meant trademark. I didn't know that wording mistakes were downvoted so harshly.
I am amazed they can even claim a trademark over magenta, is that better?
copyright protects the right of an author not to have their work copied (without their permission)
patents protect inventors from having their inventions used (without their permission)
That's what the lawyers say, anyway. Thousands of companies manage to do business for decades without egregious trademark actions.
Company A has a trademark. Company B creates its own product (perhaps trademarked as well) which is somewhat similar to Company A's trademark but in a sufficiently different product space that a lawsuit by Company A would seem potentially frivolous. Company B then grows its business over several years, starts moving into adjacent product categories, and ends up with a product that now could get mixed up with Company A's. Company A sues Company B, but Company B argues that it has invested a lot into its own brand, and Company A should have been policing its brand years ago to make sure Company B doesn't end up investing in a brand that Company A would end up considering infringing down the road.
I'm not convinced that their behavior was either justified or effective.
I hear a lot that bad things could happen if companies don't bully people over trademarks, but I also see lots of companies being good neighbors and doing fine regardless. Are all of these companies both cursed with incompetent lawyers and blessed with uncanny luck?
This is like telling everyone that you now own the letter “D” so no one can ever use that in a word again.
[1] https://www.colormatters.com/color-and-marketing/color-brand...
It's not, there's tons of fine print and multiple limits.
This is supply side protectionism at its root
Release a proper spec and let people implement
These rules enable protection for a middle man who owns a logo but otherwise produces none of the physical equipment or theory behind the functionality itself
It’s exactly the sort of nonsense ownership we need less of
Make these CEO actually contribute literally not through popularity contests and regulatory capture
https://www.deere.com/en/our-company/news-and-announcements/...