William Fry reports that the Prince estate recently teamed up with the Pantone Colour Institute to create a standardised custom Pantone colour, Love Symbol #2, honouring musical and cultural icon Prince.

Prince is deeply associated with the colour purple: his 1984 film Purple Rain featured the eponymous song.

Prince also declared purple as his favourite colour, wore purple costumes, had purple concert sets, and the Pantone colour itself is based on a customised Yamaha piano he planned to tour with before his untimely death.

Pantone often creates custom colours (Barbie’s Pink, Tiffany’s Robin Egg Blue, the US Army’s Khaki). However, it is unusual for the company to create a colour for a particular celebrity (although in 2007 it did create a special pearly-blue colour for Jay-Z).

Costly

Such colours are extremely costly to produce, are kept top secret and not made available in swatches or Pantone colour guides for public consumption.

The fact that these colours are incredibly exclusive does not mean, however, that any intellectual property rights exist in them.

A brand colour is separate and distinct from a ‘colour trademark’. Colour trademarks 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. 

Seminal

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. 

An extensive monopoly over a colour is incompatible with a system of undistorted competition, so colour trademarks, 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).