Home Knowledge Prince’s Pantone Purple – Company Announces New Colour Shade in Singer’s Honour

Prince's Pantone Purple – Company Announces New Colour Shade in Singer's Honour

September 25, 2017

The Prince Estate recently teamed up with the Pantone Colour Institute (“Pantone”) to create a standardised custom Pantone colour, Love Symbol #2, honouring musical and cultural icon Prince. While the Prince brand will not have to adhere slavishly to the new colour, the hue is set to be the ‘official’ brand colour going forward. Prince is deeply associated with the colour purple: his film ‘Purple Rain’ (featuring the famous eponymous song) came out in 1984; Prince also declared purple as his favourite colour, wore purple costumes, had purple concert sets, and the Pantone colour itself is based upon the shade of a customised Yamaha piano intended to go on a tour with the singer before his untimely death. 

Pantone often create custom colours (Barbie’s Pink, Tiffany’s Robin Egg Blue, the US Army’s Khaki), however it is unusual for Pantone to create a colour for a particular celebrity (although in 2007 Pantone did create a special pearly-blue Pantone colour for Jay-Z). Such colours are naturally extremely costly, are kept top secret and are not made available in swatches or Pantone colour guides for public consumption. However, the mere fact that these colours are incredibly exclusive does not mean that any intellectual property rights exist in them. 

Purple is often referred to as Prince’s ‘trade mark’ colour, in the colloquial sense that it is the colour with which he is commonly associated. However, it must be emphasised that the colour which a brand uses is separate and distinct from a ‘colour trade mark’. Colour trade marks can only apply to very limited and unique situations for the practical reason that there would be a vast colour depletion if every business was allowed to own their brand’s colour. 

In the seminal Libertel case the European Court of Justice confirmed that a colour per se is not normally inherently capable of distinguishing the goods and services of a particular undertaking; this is because consumers do not usually make assumptions about the origin of goods based on their colour or the colour of their packaging in the absence of graphic and word elements.  For this reason, an applicant for a colour mark will need to show that their colour mark is unusual or striking in relation to their specific goods or services – an example provided by the European Intellectual Property Office would be the colour black for milk. 

Where the colour or combination of colours is commonly used in the relevant sector and/or serves a functional or decorative purpose, an application for such a mark will be refused. Of course, some brand owners do manage to register colour trade marks but this is always difficult as the brand owner will have to show that the colour for which it seeks protection essentially is its brand, that it is not merely functional or decorative in nature, and that it meets the threshold for being absolutely striking and distinctive. Furthermore, as an extensive monopoly over a colour is incompatible with a system of undistorted competition, colour trade marks, where successfully registered, will also only protect a brand in a particular market sector (for example, T-Mobile’s magenta is protected only in the telecommunications sector; and Tiffany’s robin egg blue is only protected for boxes and bags).

Contributed By: Brian McElligott 

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