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From ArsTechnica
General Mills argued that it deserved to be awarded the trademark status because "consumers have come to identify the color yellow" on boxes of oats cereal with "the Cheerios brand." It has been marketed in yellow packaging since 1945, with billions in sales.
The board noted that "there is no doubt that a single color applied to a product or its packaging may function as a trademark and be entitled to registration under the Trademark Act." But that's only if those colors have become "inherently distinctive" in the eyes of consumers. Some of those examples include UPS "Brown;" T-Mobile "Magenta;" Target "Red;" John Deere "Green & Yellow;" and Home Depot "Orange." It goes without saying that anybody can still use those colors predominately in their marketing, but not direct competitors.
Regarding the box of Cheerios, however, the court ruled that consumers don't necessarily associate the yellow box of cereal with Cheerios, despite General Mills' assertion to the contrary. Consumers are confronted with a multitude of yellow boxes of oats cereal, the appeal board noted. By comparison, T-Mobile has only a handful of competitors, and none of them uses the magenta color as a distinctive mark, the appeal board said.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Monday August 28 2017, @03:33PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 29 2017, @12:50AM (1 child)
As far as that goes, if we must label our processed foods with nauseatingly detailed lists of contents and nutritional content estimates, it would seem equally appropriate to label luxury goods with clear information such as: source of materials, nature of labor used in assembly, and maybe even a cost breakdown for where the $120 is going in a $120 pair of shoes. If such information were accurate, it might help the consumers to make more informed choices about where their outsized discretionary purchases are going.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 29 2017, @05:32AM
I definitely would not mind seeing this. In the digital age it could even be reasonable to simply have a regulated derivative of qr codes to enable users to quickly access the exact information they're looking for without having to look through a novel, or have said novel printed on each and every label. The app could even be customized to do some cool things. For instance people could have it automatically alert the user if something contains peanuts, or whether it was outsourced, or contained genetically engineered products, or whatever their particular ethos holds as something be pursued or avoided.
Alas, consumer information came back at a time when the people were more in control of the government than companies. Without anybody ever realizing it, it seems there has been a successful Business Plot [wikipedia.org]. Somewhere along the line apparently they discovered that there's no need for a coup. Instead they can simply buy congressmen. They come almost bizarrely cheap. Probably a result of the constant and effectively mandatory system of quid quo pro that leads them to power in the first place.