Why It’s (Sometimes) Illegal to Use These Colors

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 is free when you sign up at dashing calm /h ai if you want to get all their premium features though like a VPN syncing across devices and dark web monitoring you can use the code h AI to get 10% off upgrading to premium

Channel: Half as Interesting

Views: 1,413,564

Rating: 4.9167948 out of 5

Keywords: Trademarks, Colors, Half, As, Interesting, Fast, Funny, Animated, Sam, Wendover, Productions, Witty

Id: TDRGpbxOBtM

Length: 5min 36sec (336 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 27 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/sand500]

3:36 lol

[u/72proudvirgins]

Then how come Netflix and YouTube have the same colour??