Clumsy fingers. Just as “T-Error” or “T-Offline”.
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I recall whichever tobacco marketed JPS at the time trying to claim a trademark on the colour black, and at a similar time the owners of Silk Cut claimed one on purple.
Maybe we could set Gallagher (the current owners of Silk Cut) on Deutsche Telecom?
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Where the town’s coat of arms is actually black and yellow
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Decades of the understaffed underfunded patent and trademark agencies (especially but not only the USPTO) rubber-stamping absurd filings with basically zero oversight and courts enforcing those trademarks and patents. Intellectual property law is so beyond fucked up the light from fucked up is no longer visible to the naked eye, which is good, because fucked up could sue.
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Indeed, this sort of thing has been going on for thirty years now. Not really a “trend” anymore.
https://www.secondwindonline.com/when-color-is-the-brand-trademarking-a-color
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If you are worried that a potential customer might mistake someone else’s company for yours simply based on a colour choice, your company’s probably not worth much.
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Quite honestly, it’s not the company – I guarantee nobody at T-Mobile itself is angry that a NYC insurance company is using pink and purple in their ads. It’s ultra-litigous copyright lawyers in their employ who make a career out of filing lawsuits, most of which go nowhere. I can’t imagine a sadder job than sitting on the internet and googling for random companies, hoping you’ll find one with a logo or color scheme that you might be able to sue on behalf of the company that has you on retainer.
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Well, John Deere seems to be pretty keen on suing people who paint their farm equipment yellow and green. It’s not always just the lawyers. But in this case, you’re probably right. I’ve been a ·T···Mobile· (lol) customer for several years, and they seem cool.
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Wait Cory Doctorow wrote an article that mischaracterized the details of a legal case? Get out!
/s
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This fucking stupid world keeps getting fucking stupider.
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Well, this fucks up unicorn poop for the foreseeable future.
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Like copyrighting a single note of a melody. Give them the brown note.
Their main worry must be that people in Germany see the Lemonade logo and wonder why Deutsche Telekom has suddenly started selling insurance. Yep, that sounds likely.
isn’t magenta one of the primaries used in the cmyk model?
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Right, so technically they can probably sue anyone displaying printed advertising anywhere, since magenta microdots exist in the imagery. Oh what a wonderful world.
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Bonus feature: if you just found out that T-Mobile is owned by Deutche Telekom, you now also know how they came up with the jingle they use in their ads.
It’s even worse, as German law used to allow copyright trolling even if you were not related to the company. There were a whole industry of lawyers who would sue for trademark or copyright infringement, and the company that was supposedly the injured party knew nothing of the lawsuit. It really got out of hand in the heyday of filesharing, where not only the record companies were suing willy-nilly, but shady backstreet law firms. And some big, rich ones as well whose only business was scaring families into paying or else.
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