Skip to main content

Copyrighted colour?

I was waiting in the queue at my local delivery office today (picking up a package of printer ink cartiridges - they run out fast) and reading all the posters on the wall. I find myself unable not to read something if its in front of me and I have nothing else to do.
At the bottom of one poster I found this in small print:

"Royal Mail, the Cruciform and the colour red are registered trademarks of Royal Mail plc."

The colour red? The colour red is owned by Royal Mail? How does that work? Do I have to ask permission before I use a crayon? I'm scared and confused.

Comments

ogre said…
Just use the color red, and you'll be fine. After all, it's the colour red that's copyrighted.
7:17 pm
Stephen Lingwood said…
Be gone with you and your simplified American spellings. We'll have none of that nonsense here.
7:33 pm
Robin Edgar said…
That's funny. I always thought that "the Cruciform and the colour red" were registered trademarks of Switzerland, to say nothing of the famous Swiss Army Knife.
8:16 pm
Rich said…
A registered trademark isn't the same thing as copyright, or intellectual property of any kind.

Registering a trademark allows you to say "people recognize my brand by this visual quality" in any future court case about people stealing your brand identity.

In other words, if a rival postal service launched and painted its vans and post boxes plain red, the Royal Mail could take them to court and have sufficient evidence that this service was trying to piggyback on the identity of Royal Mail to gain customers.

If you're not a postal service, the trademark on the colour red isn't stopping you from doing anything.
11:55 am
Stephen Lingwood said…
Wow, I didn't expect anyone to have an actual proper answer to my ponderings.
1:33 pm
ellenhawley said…
I'm late to the discussion, but hey, what are a few years between friends who've never heard of each other before? Yes, you do need to ask permission before using the red crayon. And the Soviet flag? That's been retroactively sued for copyright violation.
11:41 am
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Swords into Ploughshares

  "They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." Isaiah 2:4 Palestine Action are doing just this: beating swords into ploughshares i.e. putting weapons out of use. In doing so they are fulfilling this biblical mandate. They are expressing God's peace as expressed in the Jewish tradition and the Christian tradition. God desires that our swords shall be beaten into ploughshares, that we should unlearn war. That the government wants to make this action illegal has to be confronted in the strongest terms. To rush to condemn attacks on weapons but not attacks on children is perverse. To call attacks on weapons terrorism but not attacks on children is perverse. When government comes to such an extreme position - legislating that peace is war, that weapons need more protection than children - then they have fundamentally gone wrong. This is the definitio...
Post a Comment
Read more

Is humanism theologically tolerant?

OK, well this might be controversial, but I feel the need to say it. Is humanist tolerant? Please note I'm not asking about humanism within society. Clearly humanism certainly believes in tolerance within society and I'm forever glad they are often the only people in the media calling for a separation of church and state. No, what I'm talking about is descriptions of Unitarianism like this and adverts like this , discussed at Peacebang here , which say that humanism is one option, Christianity is another, God is one option among many. The trouble is, humanism, by definition is theologically opposed to theism. This is very different from the relationship between Christianity and Buddhism. These two traditions may be vastly different, but Buddhism, by definition , is not opposed to Christianity, and Christianity, by definition , is not opposed to Buddhism. But humanism is consciously defined in opposition to Christianity and theism. So to say that humanism and theism can bot...
14 comments
Read more

Clergy-wear during protests

OK, I'm wandering into the territory of Beauty Tips for Ministers here, but a couple of recent conversations have brought up the issue of what clergy should wear for protests. I know a number of Ministers who only wear clerical collars for protests. The logic is that it's important to identify as a Minister when you're supporting something society doesn't expect clergy to. So Ministers will wear a collar at gay prides or pro-choice rallies to make this point. Now I could understand this if it you wore a collar going about your general business, and also did during a protest, but I'm quite uncomfortable with the idea of wearing clerical wear ONLY for protests. The seems to be something worth exploring. I have said before that I'm not in favour of special titles or clothing for religious leadership, mainly because Jesus explicitly said this was a lot of nonsense. Religious leaders should not need these articial crutches. I have no problem with certain liturgical c...
11 comments
Read more