Name: Why It’s (Sometimes) Illegal to Use These Colors
Uploaded: 2020-01-09T06:58:59.000Z
Duration: 5 min 36 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Basic passive voice

this video was made possible by dashlane men and your passwords securely with

dashlane for free at dashing calm h AI hey this is a nice shade of turquoise

ish blue isn't it it'd be nice to make a ping-pong paddle or something with it

wouldn't it well too bad because it's one of the most protected colors out

there and you can't there are actually a lot of things you can own such as bees

beats Pete's tweed Mead meat boats boats goats gates Gators gutters butter

putters cookers Cougars coolers and colors now that might come as a surprise

to you goats are animals of incredible power that aren't subject to human

institution such as ownership but legally according to people laws you can

own a goat just as much as you could own a color to this you could say what or

huh or hmm because something so tangible and yet abstract as color has to

automatically be public domain right I mean how can someone own a color let's

take that first color as an example by itself it is a mere color but sprinkle a

little meaning into it make the public mentally connect this shade to a company

and you may have just formed the basis of legally taking ownership of it in

1985 insulation and roofing company owns Corning won the first case in the United

States allowing a company to trademark a color when they ruled that this special

shade of pink that they use for their insulation was unique to them and so

other competitors couldn't use it at all let's read some words the american legal

definition of a trademark is a word phrase symbol and/or design that

identifies and distinguishes the source of the goods of one party from those of

others so essentially if a word phrase symbol and/or design is unique and

widely identifiable as linked to a company it has the case to be a

trademark the key word in those words is design since a color can be a design and

therefore a color can be a trademark there's a big exception now the US

Supreme Court says that a trademark can be a single color as long as that color

is not functional what does that mean that means the color can't do a thing

for example the government has denied trademark applications from phone

companies wanting to protect their easily identifiable orange or yellow

telephone booths in those cases the colors function is to make the booths

easy to spot and so they can't be trademarked however if those phone

companies uniquely used a shade of teal or purple or some other low tier color

and they were well known for their branding being in that shade they'd have

a more compelling case the court stands on trademarking colors is that the color

has to meet the purpose of identifying the source of the product it has to be

widely linked to the company there are no plenty of legally recognized and

registered color trademarks including the tiffany blue shown at the beginning

Barbie pink Home Depot Orange target red and UPS Brown these companies are well

known for their branding using these unique colors and so they have been

granted trademarks for these exact colors now I just showed those

copyrighted colors in this video which is a commercial endeavor thanks to those

sweet sponsorship dollars so am I about to spend the next few months in jail

maybe but not for this in fact some colors have multiple valid trademarks

from completely different companies occurring simultaneously how is that

possible because the trademarks are also for totally different things for example

these two virtually indistinguishable shades of red are both trademarked this

one by fashion designer Christian Louboutin and this one by a department

store Target Christian Louboutin has the trademark for the use in shoe design

whereas Target has the trademark for use in department stores trademarks cover

design in specific instances so that competing or similar products don't

intersect on design let's take the example of one of the world's most

iconic and beloved logos ours the yellow text with purple background is pretty

indicative of this show when you see that at the beginning you know you're

about to watch a dumpster fire with a bit of information and bad humor thrown

in if we were considering switching it up we could maybe use coke red as our

main color or maybe even t-mobile magenta and nobody could say a thing

about it because we don't sell soda or phones we aren't competing in a similar

market so there's no basis for trademark infringement

however if another video series in a similar space where she used the

signature half as interesting yellow purple duo in their logo or bumpers and

they came out looking like ours we would have legal grounds to say that they are

violating our trademark there is therefore a reasonable legal basis to

say that I the owner of half is interesting owned this color at least

for use in online video production much like Cheesecake factories trademarks

just exist whether you want them or not you can register them but you don't have

to for them to be legally enforceable you just have to have that defined

branding in the public consciousness have your case in places like the United

States unlike copyright as long as you use it

a trademark will never expire so in summary if you want to own a color all

you have to do is create a company market is in a way that the public

connects a colors your brand and it's yours back in 1996 I actually started a

company I called it net films we put films on the internet and we had this

great bold red branding that we managed to get a registered trademark for but

eventually I forgot the company password and I couldn't figure out how to reset

it so we just shut down while there could be some embellishments in that

story what's not one is that I would have been saved if only dashlane had

existed then luckily it does now so I will never lose the password for my next

business venture where I put radio on the Internet

that's because dashing acts as a centralized secure place where you can

store all your passwords so you can keep complex passwords that look like this

that you could never remember a hackers computer could never guess - Lannon

autofills these passwords on your devices and the best part is that this

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