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Comment by batbomb | Hacker News Reader

I'm gonna play devil's advocate: That looks like a Fluke DMM knockoff. They could have easily gone with red, orange, green, or some other color I'm sure.

It would be nice if they got a warning first though.

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To a moron in a hurry, it would look exactly like a Fluke product. This is exactly what trademarks are there to protect against, and Fluke is absolutely correct in their actions to protect their brand. This will likely blow up in Sparkfun's face, and rightly so.

To a moron in a hurry every silver sedan looks exactly the same.

A silver sedan is not trademarked.

Given that it's Sparkfun, red would have seemed to be the obvious choice.

http://www.pce-instruments.com/english/slot/2/artimg/large/f...

The HF ones are red though.

Other manufacturers have their own colors. Orange would be an Agilent knock-off, red Amprobe, blue Metrix, green Gossen. Should you check to see if they have all copyrighted their color scheme - or only a market leader ?

http://deep-com.ru/public/image/fluke_179.jpg

https://cdn.sparkfun.com/assets/home_page_posts/1/4/2/8/DMM_...

Red especially is used by many companies for DMMs, it's a safe color. There's also different hues you can use, maybe burgundy, or even stripes. My point is, this color yellow is similar to Fluke yellow, and that's without proper lighting or color calibration.

http://www.circuitspecialists.com/digital-multimeters

For example, this is a very popular budget meter, Circuit Specialists have been selling it for many years (I have one that's 7 years old):

http://www.circuitspecialists.com/csi2205d.html

Trademarked, not copyrighted. And... maybe yes you should check to see if your product (coincidentally or not) happens to look an awful lot like the market leader?

Maybe if they went red or blue, some other company would come after them. The issue is trademarking a very generic color/look. How many manufactures can exist without "Your red looks too much like mine, I'm suing you"

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