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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @04:00PM
Trump is already actively bringing attention to NAFTA negotiations and he is rightly pointing out that, from the perspective of an average American these trade deals are awful. Agree or disagree with Trump he is making his case in public, and that puts him leagues ahead of what Obama tried to do. The reason Obama, and corporate media, did not bring attention to the TPP is because it would have caused a mass outrage if people understood what it actually entailed. I think that is, at the minimum, a subversion of democracy. Yes we are a republic, but we are also one where there are many protections in place to ensure the public can be informed of their representative's actions. What he did was actively work to subvert this accountability.
Why is NAFTA is bad for average Americans? We have a growing trade deficit with Mexico alone that's already just shy of $50 billion. What that means is that we import about $50,000,000,000 dollars more of stuff than we export to them. Why does this matter? Imports in excess of imports means that work (producing products) that could be done domestically is instead being done in foreign countries. That $50 billion is hundreds of thousands of American jobs killed off. Now in cases where there is expertise or resources not available domestically then it's not necessarily a problem since it's not work we could be doing ourselves anyhow. In this case however the vast majority of our imports from Mexico are things that could be done in America - cars/car parts/machinery components/production furniture/etc. Most of these products are also completely untaxed thanks to NAFTA. That is a sort of double whammy since it doubly encourages companies to remove jobs from America.
Free trade agreements massively benefit corporations who can use it to increase their margins dramatically through easier tax avoidance and access to cheaper labor. However, these perks to corporations have an inverse effect on the countries that lose these jobs. The economic defense of free trade is that the citizens of the country that suffers gain from cheaper products. Yet that's rarely how it works. More typical is company A sells makes an item for $20 and sells it for $100. Free trade enables them make it for $15. So they fire all their domestic workers, move everything over to e.g. Mexico where they make it for $15. And they ship it and sell back in the US for... $100. Free trade would be an incredible thing on the time scale of centuries as other countries develop and the US becomes to poor to afford to pay the prices we used to pay when we had these jobs. But I expect within a matter of decades we'll see a revolution in our economic system regardless (thanks to automation) so instead we're accomplishing very little other than screwing our country for the sake of letting corporations add a couple of points to their profit margins.