And this is why corporations viciously protect their trademarks. This is why Google has gone after some who use Google as a verb in common language. If it gets too much into common language, its hard to defend as a trademark. There was a court case about crayons in the past about this.
IMHO, the right thing to do is to make the openswatchbook, pick out colors, maybe just trademark the name of the book (although we don't have too if its widely used), and put all our favorite colors into it. Then we can get some of them professionally printed and sell for cheap, and releas the collection into public domain so anyone can copy them, print them, etc. Yes, you are right a.l.e., there are multiple ways that Pantone could make one's life hell. Simply taking one to court esp. in the USA would clean most clocks. Jon On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 8:01 AM, a.l.e <[email protected]> wrote: > hi >> You'd be copying the Pantone table, and Pantone would probably argue >> that "134U" was a trademark. >> > > afaik, one shouldn't be allowed to trademark common words and numbers... > (i mean: they can't be protected! but you still may get a trademark for > it if your a company like pantone) and i guess you have to register each > color as a separate trademark... not sure if pantone did it. > > imho, the biggest problem here, is not if it's trademarked or not, but > that pantone will want to argue with you about it and this will cost you > much money and effort indipendently from the fact if you or they are right. > > ciao > a.l.e > _______________________________________________ > CREATE mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/create > -- Jon Phillips http://rejon.org/ San Francisco + Beijing GLOBAL +1.415.830.3884 - USA 510.499.0894 - CHINA 86.1.360.282.8624 IM/skype: kidproto - Jabber/gtalk: [email protected] http://rejon.org/bio - http://rejon.org/bio/cv - http://rejon.org/projects _______________________________________________ CREATE mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/create
