"This is mine, that is mine... ALL this is mine."

[denny]

As pointed out on IRC:
Royal Mail, the Royal Mail Cruciform, the colour red and SmartStamp are all registered trademarks of Royal Mail Group plc.

Does anything in there strike you as a tiny bit on the broad side, as trademarks go? :)

Comments

[kaz-pixie.livejournal.com]

You still can't trademark colours at the moment as they aren't capable of being graphically represented - a hex code isn't enough according to the courts!

[hythloday.livejournal.com]

You still can't trademark colours at the moment as they aren't capable of being graphically represented

This is an astonishing statement. How is anything easier to graphically represent than a colour?

[kaz-pixie.livejournal.com]

Well because you can't distinguish it from something very similar. There's a very long and rambly judgement which I can dig out for you if you want to read it. There was a similar case for TMing the smell of a perfume where they decided that a chemical formual for the smell could not count as a graphical representation.

[hythloday.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but if you can't distinguish it from something very similar, surely it's a trademark infringement? Perfumes are different because the similarity of scents isn't immediately obvious from the similarity of chemical formulae - there's the intermediate olfactory step. On the other hand, similarity of colours is immediately obvious from just looking at the colour.

I'd be interested in seeing the judgement if you have time to look for it.

[kaz-pixie.livejournal.com]

here (http://www.out-law.com/page-3533) and here (http://www.wuesthoff.de/pdf/wuesthoff_1081419374.pdf) have some pretty good details. What the court say is that Yes colours are potentially trademarkable - because they can't say no they're not because the law doesn't specifically exclude them - but then they give a series of conditions which if you read with the YSL perfume case - make it clear that realistically you coun't register a colour.

[hythloday.livejournal.com]

Thanks for digging those up.

Interestingly, my reading of them is different to yours: from the first link, The European Court of Justice decided this week that a colour can be registered as a trade mark, so long as it is described using an internationally recognised identification code, and from the second, Thus, the Court confirmed that on appearance of the attacked advertisements in March 1999, the plaintiff had already acquired the requisite secondary meaning for the colour magenta as a sign with regard to its goods and services in the field of telecommunications [that's a trademark, isn't it?], The Court...granted the motion only with regard to the advertisements.

That reads to me that to say that the court found that the company *already* had a trademark on a particular colour; that the court didn't want to make a ruling that would lead to a "turf war" over colour trademarks being frivolously registered, but agreed that the specific adverts had actually breached the trademark.

Thanks again for the links, interesting reading and jumping-off point.