Today, our local print newspaper has a full page on the colorful dispute of the German banking group Sparkasse and Santander Bank.
On the web, several articles deal with the dispute between the S Banks and the dispute between German Langenscheidt and Anglo Rosetta Stone about the color yellow.
If you invent a process to make a color, you can patent it, no issues. If you take an existing color and claim it is sooooooo characteristic that people basically associate the color with your company without any niceties like a logo or a certain shape of the representation of the color, you can go and trademark it.
This article in FAZ online has a nifty little gadget to test if you recognize the supposedly obvious association of color and company.
The companies named above that filed a cease and desist plus damages suit are Langenscheidt and Santander.
Langenscheidt:
Langenscheid claims a certain shade of yellow. Which one?
We do not know, and we intend to show that the specific wavelength and frequency of light (that's was a color "is") may not matter as much as they claim it does.
First off, if you claim yellow in Germany, there is the postal service yellow to contend with. To a German, the primary association of yellow to a company is likely to be Deutsche Post and its DHL freight biz.
Santander:
Santander has not been doing business in Germany for very long. Sparkasse has been using its red since the early 1970s all over West Germany and later the re-unified country.
To the blogster and most regular folks, identification of a company consists of a logo. Which in turn is a color or several colors plus some text or graphic.
This makes Langenscheidt and Rosetta Stone quite unique. And Santander and Sparkasse both use a graphics piece.
While the "my color" argument puts consumers into the not very nice category of Pavlov's dogs, we do like the little art piece in front of the name Santander.
TheEditor of the K-Landnews is one lazy bastard, so it (always gender neutral, remember) went to the webby web sites of the companies and took a few screenshots.
Look at the yellows and reds in the "inspect this element" corner of Firefox and compare the values of the yellows and reds.
The numbers - and hence the colors - are different. Maybe legally they will be deemed the same?
Not withstanding this, TheEditor will not buy anything from either Langenscheidt (you missed the language learning boat) or Santander (as long as cash is still legal).
Santander screenshot & Sparkasse:
Langenscheidt & Rosetta Stone:
[Update] The choice of colors for our house was supposed to be red - white - blue. The ultimate choice was different. All the better -- what if someone had mistaken the house for a bank and either broken in (bad) or put a bag of cash into the mailbox (not quite as bad)?
As to the meaning of the name Santander, the blogster will always treat it first and foremost as the name of a city in northern Spain. In said city, there existed a Banco (de) Santander. Taking the banco out of Santander does not seem to quite promote clarity about the purpose of an entity. But that's just me.
Santander Germany does have "bank" in the website url, very much appreciated.
Primary colors should simply be off limits to trademarking or copyrighting or whatever the legal instrument is.
Is it weird to say I like the magenta of Deutsche Telekom because it is so rainbow flag?
Have you recently been grocery shopping?
Looking at the aisles, the number of products you could accuse of wanting to look like famous brand name items is staggering. Yet, I never fail to grab the look-similar off brand cookies for 79 cents instead of the branded version for 2.50.
So, please forgive me for feeling insulted by the color fights. My view is: unless I have been living under a rock, the grocery producers trust me to establish the difference between 79 cents and 2.50 but service companies think I cannot figure out where to park ten grand for no interest?
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