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It's important to keep in mind that trademarks are not copyrights. Copyright protects the investment of an artist, trademarks protect the interest of the customer. Customers want to be able to trust that when they buy shoes with the Nike swoosh, they're buying real Nike shoes and not a fake knock-off. I think that's only an issue with paint when the paint claims to be from Jardin Majorelle when it's not. The mere shade of the colour is exactly the quality that the customers do want, and possibly intentionally in a different paint type or quality, so as long as the real producer of the paint is clear, it's not a trademark issue.
What could be a trademark issue, is if there's another lush tourist garden with blue houses in Marrakesh. Of course tourists want to visit the real Jardin Majorelle and not a fake knock-off. But that's a protection within a very specific industry, and not claiming an entire colour.
> trademarks protect the interest of the customer
Microsoft would like to dissagree.
Windows Commander was fine as a name.
Wow. Another artist who's as much of a fucking douchebag as Anish Kapoor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anish_Kapoor#Vantablack_contro...
Seriously. "No-one else gets to use this color but me." Fucking douchebags.
Don't want to defend any practice here. But this looks like two different things to me. Vantablack is a product (not just a color) which is exclusively licensed to the artist by the manufacturer. If someone comes up with it's own product reproducing the same results these can still can be bought and used for art (and given the wiki entry this happened).
Whereas in this article it appears to me that they trademarked the appearance of a color, resulting in other parties changing their recipe to not appear too similar, which I find a bit more problematic.
> "Alexa turn off the lights"
> "I am sorry but that color is copyrighted, would you like to purchase it for one month?"
Patenting the process to get to Vantablack is fine, but you have no right to own that "color".
Photographs of the illuminated Eiffel Tower are also supposedly "protected" by trademark. Technically, you're not supposed to use one without permission of the government of Paris![0]
How ridiculous is that?
[0] https://www.toureiffel.paris/en/business/use-image-of-eiffel...
Trademark rights don't allow you to own the color. They allow you to restrict the use of the color within certain areas of trade, assuming you meet certain requirements.
Kapoor is not the person who made the decision to license Vantablack to only one artist, he is not the bottleneck for this material. He controls neither its production nor its supply. I don't know why he's become the villain in this story, like's he's holding the Surrey Nanosystems' CEO hostage or something.
> I don't know why he's become the villain in this story,
It was his idea. He approached the manufacturers and offered them presumably a shit-ton of money to prevent anyone else from making art with it. He's the one who came up with the idea of spending his money to limit other people's ability to make art in a certain way:
> After reading a newspaper story about the discovery of the pigment – which “we think is the blackest material in the universe, after a black hole”, Kapoor says – the excited artist contacted the British manufacturers, NanoSystem, and offered to collaborate with them.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/sep/26/anish-k...
I mean, if a bunch of beancounters in the manufacturer's head office had come up with the idea that, hey, maybe we can maximise our returns to shareholders by offering this exclusive deal around, that's at least in their wheelhouse. And an artist might might be able to rationalise taking that deal if it were offered - maybe even if only on the grounds that "if I don't, someone else will".
But for someone who calls themself an artist to decide what they really want to do is limit other people's ability to make art, and will go out of their way to instigate that and make it happen?
Fucking. Douchebag.
Your link indicated nothing about the exclusivity being his idea, though he defended it and clearly benefits from it. I find that besides the point because I'm just judging this one situation vs. the entirety of his character. I already think Kapoor is a bit up his own ass due to his hilarious displeasure for the people of Chicago calling his sculpture "The Bean".
But in this situation, it doesn't matter to me. Vantablack is not his to control, period. He doesn't make it, he can't make it, he doesn't sell it, he doesn't have the right to license it to others. It's not a paint, it's not a color, it's a space-age manufactured materials for which the one company that can legally produce it views the artistic application as an advertising spend and have apparently chosen the convenience of one big name vs. a bigger-tent approach. Kapoor is not to blame.
> Your link indicated nothing about the exclusivity being his idea,
That... is an interesting point.
As I remember, that's how it was reported at the time, even though that specific article doesn't mention it. Given that is the impression I get now from reading the article, what with him initiating the deal, it's possible that I might have merely inferred it from similar reporting in the past. So it's possible that although he approached them to use it for his art, they said OK, but then said they'd only do so if they wouldn't sell it to anyone else. And he agreed, but defends the arrangement anyway rather than saying something like "yeah, but they wouldn't let me use it at all otherwise."
So maybe that's what happened, but it doesn't sound plausible, it's not how I remember the story, and it happened nine years ago so I don't really give enough of a shit to go looking through near-decade-old reports from the time to actually double-check the details. If it does matter enough to you and you can provide a reliable source that definitively refutes it being his idea, I'll happily edit my comments and retract calling him a fucking douchebag.
In the meantime, I'll risk being a random nobody on the internet who happens to be angrily wrong about an artist they've never paid any attention to the art of. Because in the grand scheme of things, who cares what I think about him anyway?
I do think trademarking a color is ridiculous. However, I read something before (likely on HN but I can't find it now) explaining the value companies like Pantone provide. When Pantone "publish" a color, they define how this color will look when displayed on different media, printed, digital, on concrete or on wood, or under different lighting conditions including UV or IR, etc etc. It's a lot more than just saying "I own #AABBCC".
I don't know the specifics of this case, but this looks like it falls firmly into the category of "I'm egotistical" as opposed to the "I am providing additional value" category.
Yup, in fact setting a color to #RRGGBB in software doesn't mean very much. Okay, you asked for 100% red, but what is "100% red", exactly? It depends on how good the monitor is, and whether the calibration is good or not.
That's where you need measurement and calibration. You can easily see the need for it if you compare multiple displays like a monitor, laptop and cell phone showing the same picture. They're quite likely to be noticeably different.
And printing uses a completely different color system (CMYK), so things get even more interesting there.
Artists wanting to own ideas, not just the expression. They want to be creative themselves while blocking the rest.
Using legal threats to block others from creating in the same style happens today with AI too.
These recipe preambles are getting ridiculous
In Sweden there's a trademark for a shade of purple, but it's limited to the context of coffee branding
Isn’t that generally how trademarks work? Isn’t that why Cisco is allowed to make its own iOS?
Two operating systems would no doubt be considered to be in the same space. Apple licensed the iOS name from Cisco exactly to avoid a trademark suit.
Interestingly Apple also settled with the Beatles' record label after a trademark suit.
One is consumer and the other isn't, so probably no to be honest. If you are apple, better to get the license before you release a product like iOS which is on its what, 10th plus year?
Bad example perhaps (and I just noticed I got it backwards in my comment). But I’m sure there has to be a risk of creating confusion amongst consumers for trademark infringement to take place.
Another example would be cadbury (chocolate company) and another shade of purple. It makes sense - if you go into the shops and see a wall of purple, it is nice if you know what this actually represents, and don't have all the different brands converging on the colour of the most popular brand.