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Startup insurance provider Lemonade is trying to make the best of a sour situation after T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom claimed it owns the exclusive rights to the color magenta.
New York-based Lemonade is a 3-year-old company that lives completely online and mostly focuses on homeowners and renter's insurance. The company uses a similar color to magenta — it says it's "pink" —
But Lemonade was told by German courts that it must cease using its color after launching its services in that country, which is also home to T-Mobile owner Deutsche Telekom. Although the ruling only applies in Germany, Lemonade says it fears the decision will set a precedent and expand to other jurisdictions such as the U.S. or Europe.
"If some brainiac at Deutsche Telekom had invented the color, their possessiveness would make sense," Daniel Schreiber, CEO and co-founder of Lemonade, said in a statement. "Absent that, the company's actions just smack of corporate bully tactics, where legions of lawyers attempt to hog natural resources – in this case a primary color—that rightfully belong to everyone."
[...] Lemonade also filed a motion today with the European Union Intellectual Property Office, or EUIPO, to invalidate Deutsche Telekom's magenta trademark.
Lemonade also issued a color chart ([pictured]) with which it asserts are the hues at issue.
"Here in the U.S., we do recognize trademark rights in colors, but they are not easy to acquire," says Ira E. Silfin, a trademark attorney with Mandelbaum Silfin Economou. "When they are acquired they are fairly narrow. So, everyone knows UPS is brown, but that's only for shipping and logistics, not sports such as Cleveland Browns or anything else. If T-Mobile tried to stop an insurance company—or a bakery or a cosmetics company—from using their pink-magenta color in the U.S., they would have a pretty hard time."
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @07:48AM (2 children)
Read the rest of what Silfin says: "When they are acquired they are fairly narrow. So, everyone knows UPS is brown, but that's only for shipping and logistics, not sports such as Cleveland Browns or anything else. If T-Mobile tried to stop an insurance company—or a bakery or a cosmetics company—from using their pink-magenta color in the U.S., they would have a pretty hard time." In Fluke's case, their core products are industrial test, measurement, and diagnostic equipment like multimeters, and the yellow colour their products use is a rather distinctive part of their branding. As such, other multimeters using a similar-enough colour scheme could conceivably be confused with their products, which is exactly what trademark law is supposed to prevent. This is completely different from Deutsche Telekom exerting trademark over a colour they use against someone in an unrelated industry. Lemonade isn't even in the telecommunications business, and there's no way that their products and services could be confused with those of Deutsche Telekom even if they used similar colour schemes. What happened there is more like Fluke suing Caterpillar because Caterpillar's bulldozers are coloured a shade of yellow similar to that used by Fluke's multimeters.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday November 08 2019, @08:49AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday November 08 2019, @03:52PM
There is more to companies ripping off Fluke than just the color. I've actually looked at advertisements that used the Fluke name to get your attention. Fluke accessories even more so than the actual meters. As an experiment, you can do a search on Ebay for "fluke multimeter", and count up how many obvious ripoffs compared to genuine Fluke products. Note that if you carefully narrow your search, you can eliminate a large number of ripoffs. The above search term will give you hits for multimeter leads, thermocouples, replacement parts, and more, most of which are fakes.