Not long ago someone noticed Deutsche Telekom AG, parent company of T-Mobile, claimed it owned the patent on the color magenta in the trademark statement on its website. Other, more heavily trafficked sites picked up on the story, and Engadget (one of my daily reads) went so far as to speak to a copyright attorney about average folks’ rights with respect to this rubbish.

Two days ago, DT sent Engadget Mobile a cease & desist letter regarding the use of magenta in the logo for their sister site, Engadget Mobile. Yesterday Engadget’s editor, Ryan Block, announced a tweaked Engadget Mobile logo and a sort of magenta-wash campaign to protest this obvious abuse of copyright law (it’s obvious when you read the link at the beginning of this paragraph – lays out why this isn’t copyright infringement).

I understand that companies are required to protect their trademarks, copyrights, patents & trade secrets – if they didn’t, such protections would carry no weight. From a legal standpoint, (And obviously my many years in the legal profession, right? Right?) I see where they’re coming from. From a realistic perspective, maybe claiming to own magenta was kind of dumb in the first place. Perhaps if DT invented a color, but magenta is a pretty widely used color. It’s a base color for the CMYK color model (Hello? M == Magenta). While I am a T-Mobile subscriber, I’m not a big fan of magenta on its own, but Ryan’s actually taken to time to comment on this site before. Being the comment-/attention-whore that I am, I feel kind of obligated to give his cause some love. Plus, I agree with him.* So, grab your Che t-shirt & beret, link to the image above, spread the word, fight the power, down w/ the man and all that – you know the rhetoric!

* Block has said many times that this is not an April Fool’s joke. If it is color me, and most of the ‘tubes, gotten. Well played, sir(s).

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