Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1337
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: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @05:31AM (14 children)
Seriously, look at the color picture [adage.com]. Even to my poor color vision, those colors are nowhere close. I don't think I'd confuse them even if they weren't side-by-side. And then to make it worse, the company doesn't even use the color they have the trademark on. And this doesn't even get to the whole over-broad issue, as pointed out by the lawyer.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Friday November 08 2019, @06:32AM (7 children)
Apropos "colors nowhere close":
1. download the image, wipe out the texts on them (flood them in the same color), print them, cut them separately, put them in a hat and extract one at random. Then, only by looking at that color, tell which one of the 5 it is.
2. try a color hue discrimination test like this one [youtube.com] (sorry, couldn't find an interactive one quickly).
(point: having them side by side make it easy to discriminate between them. Having them separated, not so much).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @08:41AM (4 children)
I did two tests on myself. The first was being presented with 20 of each color one by one in random order and trying to name which color was which from memory. The RAL 4010, the pink, and the purple color was accurate 100% of the time. Between the website redish and their reddish the accuracy was 28/40.
Then I did what you suggested and had 10 fields with 1 being different. Now, I only had 5 of each of the 20 permutations of color combinations, but was 98% accurate. And one miss may be a misclick, as I didn't get the results until the end and I had an "oh crap" moment when I clicked too fast on one of the trials.
So either my color vision is better than I thought, the colors on my browser were too easy to distinguish due to some calibration issue, this suit is full of crap, or a combination of the above.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday November 08 2019, @09:20AM (3 children)
My spatial/visual memory is absolutely crap. It's the temporal/situational memory that goes a lot better. E.g I can't remember after 10 minutes where I saw a thing on a cluttered table top (so I need to visually scan it again) but I remember where I put an odd thing maybe for years (because I have no troubles to remember why I thought that place was appropriate).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @05:07PM (1 child)
Humm...short term memory loss. What have you been smoking?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday November 08 2019, @09:02PM
Tobacco
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday November 09 2019, @03:54AM
Similarly ... I do a lot of classic tabletop puzzles, of the +1000-piece variety. Have discovered that I remember every piece I see -- I may not know where I saw it, but I'll remember seeing it, so once the spot it should fit against is built, my hand often goes to the right piece (among a hundred more of the same color range) as if by magic.
Basically my brain remembers everything, can't be arsed to index any of it, but the desired datum frequently floats to the top with no apparent antecedent.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday November 09 2019, @12:35PM (1 child)
Heh. Friend of mine was involved in a court case some years ago in which one piece of evidence was deemed "bad" and another, completely identical piece of evidence was deemed "OK". He was tempted to submit both but "forget" to label them, so the court would have to sort out which of the two totally identical items was the "bad" one.
I woulda done it :-).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 10 2019, @06:42AM
Except when you get busted, you can easily lose your license.
But a friend of mine had a similar thing in a deposition. They had a fingerprint expert examine fingerprints and then provide testimony about them. The interesting thing was two were identical fingerprints, just cropped differently with no other changes. No one, including the expert, noticed they were identical. I noticed a few days later when I was helping him review the various bits of evidence and prepare his exhibit book. He was planning to have some fun with that expert until the case was dismissed for unrelated reasons.
(Score: 4, Informative) by bradley13 on Friday November 08 2019, @10:16AM (4 children)
Talking about how similar (or dissimilar) the colors are - this is missing the point.
The point is that trademarks are only relevant within a particular area. McDonalds may be able to prevent another restaurant from using arches as a symbol. But they would have little chance (except via intimidation) of preventing someone in a completely different area from using them (for example, there is a "twin arches" wine). AFAIK, trademarks are only enforceable where consumer confusion is possible.
T-Mobile uses magenta, and sells communication services. Lemonade wants to use pink (as in "pink lemonade") to sell insurance. There is no danger of consumer confusion. T-Mobile should not be allowed to block out the use of an entire section of the color palette, across all industries.
It's a stupid court decision, and will almost certainly be overruled on appeal.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday November 08 2019, @02:56PM (3 children)
TFA clearly states that the rulling is by a German court in Germany:
Why do you think that quoting US law is of any relevance here?
What makes you so certain that it will be 1. appealed at all? and 2. that a German court would overrule the decision? US law has absolutely no relevance here whatsoever. US law is great in the USA, but has no standing in the rest of the world.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Friday November 08 2019, @04:03PM (2 children)
Tell that to Kim Dotcom, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange. The main difference is that only one of them committed any "crime" on US soil.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by janrinok on Friday November 08 2019, @05:50PM (1 child)
If Lemonade don't like it, they can pull their operation out of Germany. The US still has no jurisdiction in this case. I don't think that it is a sensible application of German law, but they are free to do what they wish in their own country. The US can also take its laws and do what they wish with them - but they have no legal basis in Europe. Now, if you are suggesting that Germany might bend under US pressure then it demonstrates why not every nation supports the US version of democracy, but I don't think it will come to that.
How about if Saudi Arabia insists that American women in the US can no longer do any of the things that are illegal for Saudi women in their country? Would you say that they have a right to impose their laws upon people in America?
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday November 13 2019, @04:04PM
I was just pointing out that, even though, it's not in the USA, the influence of the USA is quite extensive. I have no reason to think the USA would be quite so interested in Germany's T-Mobile vs Lemonade also of Germany. It's definitely a slippery slope and I'm not in favor of importing Sharia law or other social regressions.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday November 08 2019, @04:00PM
Okay, #4 is definitely different enough in my opinion, but 3 is very similar to 1, 5 is definitely easily misidentified as 2, and 2 is the actual trademarked color. Personally, I'd say that makes 3 and 4 permissible, with 5 being infringing.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Friday November 08 2019, @05:35AM (1 child)
So, how many colours can you patent until everything is too close to a patented colour?
For reference, the colours are:
Just looking at the numbers (and without doing any actual calculation), I'd say there's room for a low two-digit number of sufficiently mutually different colours.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday November 08 2019, @08:45AM
Note, however, that in order to look like Ferrari red on telly, Ferrari F1 cars are actually more orange than Ferrari red (and pisstakers often refer to them as such). So that's another huge splat removed from the canvas.
Note: I am an anomolous dichromat (i.e. I'm a bit derpy when it comes to distinguishing colours (and that's my excuse for my godawful fashion sense)), and even I can tell the different pinks in the swatches apart.
If we're taking a vote, count me in the "Fuck T-Mobile", or even "Fuck T-mobile, with blunt rusty objects until they're bleeding out of their chest", camp. This is absolutely not what intellectual property law was supposed to be protecting, and abusers need to be punished.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @05:56AM (8 children)
I seem to remember a case where Fluke had a shitload of competitors multimeters destroyed because they were yellow.
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/19/multimeters-without-a-country-flukes-broad-trademark-bans-yellow-multimeter-imports/ [hackaday.com]
(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.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday November 08 2019, @08:57AM (4 children)
Absurd trademark. Fuck Fluke.
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, @03:56PM (1 child)
That's about how I remember things. First came the dark case, and I still have a first gen 77 in my toolbox to verify it. Then generation 2 came with the yellow shock cushion slipper. Sometime between Gen 2 and Gen 3 Fluke started making their cases for some meters in yellow. The Fluke 77 Gen IV is the hard yellow case, and I suspect everything they sell now is in hard yellow cases.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday November 09 2019, @12:27AM
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, @04:11PM
Errr, ummmm, wait a second. Was there a gray slip on cushion for Gen 2 meters? I recall seeing a darker colored cushion of a meter, at some time. Not sure if it was a Fluke cushion, or maybe it was a third-party thing. Maybe even it was from a different brand of meter. The only thing I'm sure of, is seeing a Gen 1 or Gen 2 Fluke 77 in a cushion that was near the same color as the Fluke. Definitely not yellow.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @04:14PM
Really? I think that's uncalled for in this instance. It's one thing to be mad at how aggressively US customs enforces trademarks like this, but "Fuck Fluke?"
After US customs seized Sparkfun's multimeters, Fluke made things right [sparkfun.com] by offering Sparkfun, free of charge, a shipment of genuine Fluke meters, and suggested they could sell them to recoup the value of the lost shipment or give them away. Sparkfun accepted the offer and subsequently donated them for educational uses. Stay classy, Fluke.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jasassin on Friday November 08 2019, @06:00AM (2 children)
If I were a T-Mobile customer, it's this kind of absurdity that would make me change carriers when my plan expired.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @06:42AM
T-Mobile is the least bad of the monopolizing bad bunch.
Said as someone who has had service from all 3 in the past 2.5 decades.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Friday November 08 2019, @04:07PM
Currently, I'm on a shared plan with extended family, so I'm not going to be complaining about what provider I have.
That said, the only thing that kept me on AT&T was the knowledge that they were able to cover the area(s) I was in. I don't have enough disposable income to be signing up for a contract to find out that T-Mobile doesn't service my area as well as AT&T.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Friday November 08 2019, @08:29AM (1 child)
...in Germany. German courts decide Coca-Cola can no longer use their Red/Black/White scheme to sell their product in Germany. EU court to follow.
For the Whoosh-inclined: I'M KIDDING!
Nevertheless, draw your own conclusions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @04:06PM
Why not? The color Nazi might come after you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @02:52PM
Marketing to customers is so hard even branding colors are a big deal
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @08:58PM
Adding to the absurdity -
I'm wondering if Beyonce's album "Lemonade" inspired that company's name. Its running theme was making the best of bad situations. Kinda like what insurance companies should be about.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @09:56PM
> exclusive rights to the color
Nuclear launch detected.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday November 08 2019, @10:11PM
Plus UPS has been in that business [youtube.com] long enough that you don't even need to say their name.