The Color Magenta, Or How T-Mobile Thinks It Owns A General Color

The Color Magenta, Or How T-Mobile Thinks It Owns A General Color

4 years ago
Anonymous $xdcOWPpsb_

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191106/15021143340/color-magenta-how-t-mobile-thinks-it-owns-general-color.shtml

You might think that throwing a word like "magenta" into the Techdirt search engine wouldn't get you any results. But you would be wrong about that and you'd be wrong entirely because of T-Mobile and its parent company Deutsche Telekom. See, Telekom has trademark rights in several countries for a very specific shade of magenta. And with those trademarks, Telekom rather enjoys threatening other businesses that dare to use anything that remotely looks like magenta in their trade dress, whether the color in question is actually magenta or not, and regardless of whether the other company is even a competitor or not.

And Telekom is still at it to the present. A German court has informed a startup insurance company out of New York called Lemonade that it must cease to use the shade of pink it's been using in it's branding for three years.