Great Western Coffee Shop

On my last trip to London last week I noticed that the green paint was being splashed about at Parkway and also at Swindon .

Has the colour been made subject to copyright, does anyone know? Sounds daft, but it happens, even if it is questionable in intellectual property law.

I think I heard the other day that parcel delivery firm UPS had trademarked their brown vans. If I recall correctly, trademarks only apply within the same industry, so a TOC could use UPS's brown on a train livery if they want but only UPS may use the colour on a delivery van (I'm not a lawer, but there was a lecture or two on copywrite, patents and tradmarks in my MEng course at university). Therefore, if GWR have applied for brand protection of the green they use, it is probably trademark protection and thus there would probably be nothing to stop, for example, a bus company using Great Western Green, but other TOCs couldn't use it.

Trademarks apply to the segments/markets they are applied to.

If UPS trademarked their brown on vans, trains, bikes and hovercraft, then those are the segments that would be covered. If they applied for only vans, then it would only be vans.

But if I recall, the segments are not that specific, I think it's just Transport, for example.

I didn't think you could trademark colours, I thought it was only words and logos, but you could have a design patent on the colour scheme, buts its been a long time since I did any trademark applications  :o

I think the overarching principle is that of confusion. If an ordinary man on the Clapham omnibus could be led to believe he was obtaining a service from company A because of the particular colour or other design feature of their product or vehicle, but was in fact tricked into obtaining the same service from company B because of their similar colouring, company A could sue if it had protected that scheme for its own use.

A quick look shows that UPS claim the colour brown in their list of US trade marks, but I can't find any claim of a colour in any of their (many) UK registrations. However, they now own all Lynx's marks, and some of those include a colour as an aspect of the mark - and the obvious one of those is Red Star:
(https://www.ipo.gov.uk/trademark/image/GB50000000002102217.jpg)
"Mark Description/Limitation
    The applicant claims the colours red, black and white as an element of the mark."

The colour green has been trademarked by BP ^ but that's for petrol stations.

A colour wouldn't be made subject to copyright.  It might be possible to register a colour as a trade mark.  BP green, Cadbury's purple being some examples.  This practice is not questionable in intellectual property law. it is deliberately provided for in the Trade Mark Directive and the UK Act. 

It is not easy to trademark a colour and to be successful you would need good evidence of distinctiveness, ie evidence (typically survey data) that the public associates the colour with your brand.  Where there is strong association you might get registration although obviously only for the goods and services for which their is evidence of distinctiveness.

GWR green has nowhere near the level of distinctiveness needed to be registered as a trade mark.  If it was used consistently for a number of years then maybe it would reach the threshold (as original GWR cream and chocolate brown may have done) 

 

Much better explanation than mine - forget copyright, remember trade mark!

As an aside, during my brief study of law I once asked a senior lecturer over a beer what was the most lucrative specialism. "Maritime, then intellectual property", he said. That was around 1990, and I dare say the order has since been reversed.

It does look as if a colour on its own is just barely acceptable for registration, so for BP most of theirs are a lot more specific. The broadest one appears to be this (UK0002240552C):

They do have a lot of them, so there may be other areas where they also claim just that colour. Mostly they specify green and yellow, as well as where it goes, though surprisingly for the sunflower motif (if that's what it is) they don't mention the colour at all.

Close, the BP logo is called the 'Helios', the colour of which is not mentioned in the trademark presumably as it is also used in black & white/greyscale on letterheads and the like.

As mentioned above, the colour is protected for the exterior of filling stations in order that people can't pass off any old filling station as a BP filling station, although the colour can be used for pumps and such like. Quite a nice example of these IP laws working as they should.

Strictly they apply to the goods and services listed in the Trademark specification which is submitted as part of the application and is subject to examination by the Trademark examiner. 

easyGroup which includes easyJet is another where the exact colour pantone has been registered.

In the interests of clarity, I've split these recent posts off into this new discussion, separate from the existing 'renaming of FGW/GWR' topic.  :)

I hereby claim the colour magnolia as my trademark. Use it if you like, but I want 5p per wall.

Not really how it works.  You can claim it as a trademark (put "TM" on your magnolia walls if that makes you feel better - Trademark lawyers sometimes refer to "TM" as "totally meaningless"), but the mark will only be validly registered (entitling you to use the (R) symbol, the use of which would otherwise be a criminal offense) if your mark meets the criteria (essentially of it having inherent or acquired distinctiveness which is capable of acting as a sign for the source of goods or services).  It would only be registered for the goods and services in your specification.

And even if you got magnolia registered.  I'd only be infringing if I used it in the course of trade to offer identical or similar goods or services under the mark.

I'd say that that was reasonable.  It isn't an absolute ban on others using orange (BA can still serve orange juice of their flights for example and a mobile phone operator can use the exact same colour in their brand), but if another airline started branding their planes in the same orange theme, then you could see that the public might genuinely see an association between Easyjet/Easygroup and those planes.  If there was no such connection the public would be being mislead and EasyGroup's brand would be being diluted.  It is that kind of thing that their registration would stop.

Where it gets interesting is where a colour has become so distinctive that it causes the public to make a connection even when the colour is used for different goods.

So if I won the next GW franchise and decided to paint all of the trains in white and orange, I would bet that a good proportion of the travelling public would think that the trains were being run by EasyGroup/EasyJet even if the word "Easy" did not appear anywhere.  EasyGroup have never run trains and have therefore not use their colour brand for trains.  Should EasyGroup be able to stop my actions? What if their was evidence that people were attracted to my trains by the Orange/White branding expecting to find low cost fares and ended up seeing the high price and complexity of my tickets and being put off not just my trains but the whole EasyGroup?

Is that all shades of Magnolia?  Mine is described as 'a subtle hint of magnolia'   :P

Off on a slight tangent (again - sorry mods!!  ;D), but I wonder if they would ever be tempted to branch out - they've done airlines, hotels, car hire thus far...potentially a strong brand link up in a similar fashion to Virgin...

They might.  And I'd welcome it.  It does seem however that the days of new dynamic franchisees has mostly passed.  You've almost got to be a foreign state owned railway or First or Stagecoach these days to win a franchise.  Even Virgin, is only a minor partner in their recent ECML franchise.   

Or, to put that another way, only a company committed to the rail sector would bid for a franchise, given the low profit (3% or less) combined with a significant political risk despite the rigidity of the agreements. (See any form of business journalism for the details.)

I long ago reached the conclusion that members of this forum only do that to try and wind me up ...  ::) :P ;D