Yes, you can trademark a color

It turns out it’s possible to trademark a color. For example, T-Mobile owns the color magenta. Really.

Here’s an explanation:

“To clarify, companies like T-mobile can only trademark in the industry sector that they are registered in. So T-Mobile has trademarked the color magenta in telecommunications. The blog COLOURLovers says that this means, "you just can’t use the color magenta around anything to do with phones, digital media… oh and just about anything on the internet."”

Big companies consider color an important part of their marketing purposes. Here’s a chart of the color spectrum vs brand logos from Wired magazine:

Several months ago I posted a question here asking readers to suggest questions to ask LED manufacturers at the “Designing with LEDs” Workshop panel discussion. One of the questions raised by Meredith Poor was, "It should be possible to create a ‘brown’ LED for UPS and candy company counter displays. Would the unit costs be all that different from pink and purple ones?”

Although Evident Technologies, a manufacturer of quantum-dot-based LEDs, wasn’t on the panel, I thought this would be right up its alley, since custom LED colors is one of the benefits of quantum dot phosphors.  I forwarded the question, and Evident’s marketing folks explained, “Using quantum dot phosphors, you can create essentially any color that does not have a black component. Because brown contains a black component, it is a difficult color to create with emitted light. One option is to backlight a brown plastic or acetate. With quantum dots, you could create an LED that matches the RGB or CMY components of the brown, the plastic would provide the black or K component and create a brown emitted light.” So with quantum dots, you have a virtually unlimited number of colors available in LED lighting.

Pretty neat, huh? Ok, here’s where it gets ironic: Evident Technologies filed for bankruptcy this summer after being sued for patent infringement over quantum dot technology by Invitrogen, a Carlsbad, Calif.-based bio-sciences company (now known as Life Technologies). Evident’s law firm is one of the company’s largest creditors with $951,184.88 owed in attorneys’ fees.

Another instance of the continuing see-saw/tension/debacle between innovation and protection in technology.