Hacker News Reader

Comment by kuschku | Hacker News Reader

This might seem like overreach, but is just a natural consequence of trademark laws.

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.

View on HN

Well, there is a thing called colormark, But as far as I know, color marks apply to companies from the same industry. T-Mobile and Lemonade are not in the same industry therefore, Lemonade should be able to use Magenta.

The issue the article points to is both companies provide insurance products: Lemonade for renters and T-Mobile for its own handsets. I’m not convinced the average consumer would be confused by the two, however.

They both sell insurance, so one could argue they are in the same industry. Unless we're going to sub-divide insurance between Home/Car and Phone.

T-Mobile sells insurance on devices they also sell. I have never seen a dedicated insurance company selling insurance specifically on mobile devices. The likelihood of consumer confusion is tiny.

That's like saying that blizzard and oracle are competitors because they are both in the software industry. If you can't substitute the product from one company with another, then they are not competitors.

In this case, if you can't buy phone insurance (the product you would buy from T-Mobile) from Lemonade, they are not competitors.

>They both sell insurance..

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)

Most consumer insurance companies are selling upstream insurance. They buy insurance wholesale, and then resell it making a cut and taking care of the customer facing part.

T-Mobile does the same. So in that way they're no different than any other type of consumer insurance company.

IMHO selling insurance as a form of extended warranty on a physical product is not the same thing. I see what you're saying but I just don't see the average consumer confusing the two brands just because T-Mobile happens to sell insurance for their phones. They also sell cell phones but I don't think of them as a cell phone company, they're simply a carrier.

T-Mobile don't just sell "extended warranties" they also sell theft, accidental damage, and similar even on phones (on their network) you didn't buy from them (e.g. €10/month). There's no distinction between what they do and other insurance companies insuring the same product class do.

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.

According to the article, there might be a problem there as T-Mobile does offer several forms of insurance: Things like mobile device insurance and cybersecurity insurance.

And therein lies the obvious conclusion of allowing conglomerations. If one company has their foot in every possible industry, they can yield control far beyond what would normally be considered unreasonable.

I mean we are actually discussing “T-Mobile isn’t a mobile carrier, they’re an insurance company”.

Rather "T-Mobile I'd a mobile carrier AND an insurance company".

Knowing T-Mobile and the full-of-shiteness that I possesses them, they can argue this about every market. I am.sure they own a canteen somewhere so there goes the food industry, and they probably sponsor some major team so there goes sports equipment and so on and so forth. Greed doesn't stop.

Even trade marks are like that thus Toyota Lexus and Lexis Nexus can coexist, though a court case had to settle that dispute.

You have a gross misunderstanding of how it works.

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.

An example of how this gets dicey when you expand into new industries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer

And Telekom trademarked the color magenta for the industries they're active in - such as mobile phone insurance or cybersecurity insurance, which happens to be the same industry Lemonade is active in.

It's not "natural consequences". Canonical counter example is this cease-and-desist for a book copying the Jack Daniels label design: https://mashable.com/2012/07/22/jack-daniels-trademark-lette...

I remember when Intel tried to trademark the number "80". Thankfully they lost that one.

>then it becomes quite obvious that colors are treated the same.

Does it? Because that seems like nonsense.

Color is an interesting thing, however. Because there are only so many colors to go around.

Imagine if companies could reserve an entire letter. All words beginning with that letter would belong to them.

You mean like Apple did with the lowercase "I"?

Or rather, tried to do?

https://www.smh.com.au/technology/apples-future-wont-be-brou...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com