Yesterday, I mentioned easyJet’s 2004 squabble with Orange over the colour orange:
The Easy conglomerate, owners of the travel company easyJet, uses Pantone 021C, but famously got into trouble with the mobile phone company Orange – which has trademarked the similar shade Pantone 151C – when it started easyMobile in 2004.
EasyJet hasn’t backed down over that claim in the intervening eight years. If anything, they’ve gone in harder.
Their linking policy – which I’m not linking to because, well, you’ll see – bans anyone “linking to the easyJet Website by any means” from using the colour Orange. At all:
Related
3.3 You agree that you shall not use the colour orange (pantone reference 021C, HTML reference #FF6600) on your Website except as part of an easyJet Trade Mark used as permitted in clause 3.1 above.
The policy also bans you from linking to anywhere on the site other than the homepage:
Content from our partners
4.1 You are permitted to provide and maintain a Link to the easyJet Website Homepage only at URL http://www.easyjet.com. You may not direct the Link to any other webpage contained within the easyJet Website.
Of course, such policies have been around for ages. But I’ve not yet seen one which claims ownership over an entire colour.