wwwtesting - blue

[Tink]

At 00:12 +0100 30/01/03, Marco Krohn wrote about Re: wwwtesting - blue:

|On Wednesday 29 January 2003 21:18, Datschge at gmx.net wrote:
|
|> How specific are "color trademarks" regarding the protected colors? I'd
|> expect them to be exact RGB values, not some blurry specification...
|
|I heard a lecture from a patent lawyer this semester and we only touched the
|topic "color" for a couple of minutes (the lecture was more about traditional
|trademarks, patents etc). What I remember though is that it is very very hard
|to defend a color in court.
|
|For example the German Telekom tried to defend "its" color "magenta" but lost
|(at least afaik) in court [1,2] (it is probably interesting to read the
|comment [3] too).

That wasn't too surprising because if you the know te basic colors, 
and in the world of corporate ID trademarks colors are mostly 
discussed in print colors CMYK (Cyan, Magenta Yellow and Black), 
you'll notice that Magenta is the basic color. So it would be very 
difficult to trademark that. However, most corporate trademark colors 
are the so called compounded colors either PMS or Pantone colors or 
as CMYK colors as for instance Eramus University Rotterdam CI uses 
Pantone Color 3165 which makes it easier to trademark because they 
are unique colors.


|On the other hand I am quite sure that some RGB value difference won't help at
|all (the difference between (x,y,z) and (x+1,y,z) is surely not perceivable)
|and defining a good measure for the "distance" of two colors is far from
|being trivial. Probably they do some kind of survey (seems they did it in [4]
|where they asked the addressed "community" ("angesprochene Verkehrskreise")
|to find out if they link a color combination with some company or not.)

As said before, RGB color will most likely never be used in 
trademark, colors will be transfered to their CMYK values.

Reason behind this is that corporate colors are mostly and 
traditionally used in print. Nowadays corporations will match their 
websites with their coropate identity. (IBM, DB, Ferarri etc)

|My personal summary: use any color you like. I don't think there is any chance
|to get sued for this, and if they really do it, it will hurt them by far more
|than the KDE project. KDE probably infringing so many software patents that
|some stupid color trademark law will not add much to this anyway. All IMHO of
|course.

Sorry but I think it's ignorant tho think like this.
In the near future I forsee a great need for KDE to have a consitent 
indentity. Website, brochures, logo's, posters, stationary and 
businesscards need to have the same consitent look and feel, 'Using 
any color you want' is not a good starting point. Careful research 
and making sure you can use something without it giving you hours of 
trouble and difficulties later, will save you time and stress. KDE 
had too many problems and was hurted already with trademark/copyright 
infringements, software that needed to be renamed etc. Remember 
kOffice Illustrator?

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Tink - France