Easy Mobiles

Once I’ve already stated that the reverse-hijacking attempt of easyGroup IP Licensing Limited is based on a false premise that the old version of www.easy-mobiles.co.uk used the same colour as easyGroup websites.
I quote:

your use of the colour orange at the top of each page of your website, being the same colour orange as that used by easyGroup as part of its brand identity
DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary Letter Page 2
(my emphasis)

If in other orange disputes (see for example Orange vs easyMobile which easyMobile ultimately lost) two sides in fact used the same colour, no matter if it can be classed as Orange or not. Our case is different. As I mentioned before, the colour used on the old version of the website is NOT THE SAME as the one Easy Group claims their rights to. But just how different the two colours in question are?

For those of you who are not technically minded I shall remind that each pixel on a computer screen is composed of three primary colours: red and green and blue (also known as RGB channels). In Web Design it is possible to code each colour as a combination of values of these three channels. The standard of today supposes that each channel can have 256 grades from 0 to 255 in Decimals (00 to FF in Hexadecimals) which in combination produces 256×256×256=16777216 colours (also known as 24-bit or Truecolor). As these values are hard to memorize, developers for their own convenience created so-called Named Colors standard which provided plain English names for a number of colours used in programming and web site development. This standard begun to emerge as soon as colour displays appeared and the first named colour palette supported by W3C first had only 16 colours named. Orange was among them with a value of FFA500. Although more colours had been added with time, acquiring their names and respective positions in the Named Colour table the value of Orange did not change. Now the palette consists of more than 140 colours and used with minor variations by all major browsers. A variation of this palette known as X11 is recommended by W3C as a basis for CSS3 Color module.
What is important in our reasoning is that this palette is a de-facto industry standard and that it is applied to screen media (as opposed to printed matter etc). Also important is the fact that colour names are based on human perception and refer to colours easily identifiable by their names within the palette. Logically, names we can find in the Named Colors palette are so far the best guidance possible when it comes to identifying colours by name on the Internet.

Let us now look at the Orange section of this palette and compare it to colours used on easyMobile.com and www.easy-mobiles.co.uk websites.

Firstly it is apparent that both subjectively and in terms of their numeric value colours used on the corresponding website are substantially different (compare 255 102 0 and 254 128 32). In Fact the closest named colour similar to the colour used by easyMobile is not orange but TOMATO.
As we have demonstrated, in strict terms the passage quoted above should actually read:

your use of the colour Tomato at the top of each page of your website, being the same colour Tomato as that used by easyGroup as part of its brand identity

However, even in this case DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary are wrong. The old version of the www.easy-mobiles.co.uk website in fact contains the colour that is close to colour Dark Orange whilst it is precisely their client who uses the colour extremely close to the colour Tomato as part of its brand identity.
This brings us to the most important question:
Is Tomato Fruit or Vegetable?
The importance of this question should not be underestimated as the correct answer would ultimately shed the light of truth on the matter of the use of colour Orange. It is a matter of common knowledge that orange is a fruit. If tomato is a vegetable - the two colours definetly belong to two different taxonomic groups and shall be classed differently. If opposite is true and both belong to the group of fruits it will be harder to prove that the colour used on the old version of the www.easy-mobiles.co.uk website is not the same as the colour used on the easyMobile.com website.

We refer to the expert opinion made public in the Acreage Living, Vol. 7, No. 7
July 2001, a periodical published by the Iowa State University.
At firs the expert opinion sounds twofold and therefore ambiguous:

Botanically speaking, the tomato you eat is a fruit. A “fruit” is any fleshy material covering a seed or seeds. Horticulturally speaking, the tomato is a vegetable plant. The plant is an annual and non-woody. (source: Produce Marketing Association and the Produce for Better Health Foundation.)

However, botanical, horticultural or even common sense definitions are of lesser importance to us as long as we have a clear legal definition and here, fortunately enough we have a clear and straightforward answer:

In 1893, the United States Supreme Court ruled the tomato was a “vegetable” and, therefore, subject to import taxes. The suit was brought by a consortium of growers who wanted it declared a vegetable to protect U.S. crop development and prices. Fruits, at that time, were not subject to import taxes, and foreign countries could flood the market with lower priced produce.

Based on this precedent one can only conclude that the two colours in question are different in kind and hence one shall find the claim made by easyGroup IP Licensing Limited to be completely unfounded.

For the time being I restrain myself from drawing any further analogies and stretching the subject from the realm of plants towards the aquatic life. Although the parallel between the colour Salmon and the colour Coral and colours used by the two sides of the dispute is apparent a complete legal analysis of this fact demands further research to be undertaken.

Disclaimer: this article contains elements of parody as well as a serious message. To those unable to separate the two I shall recommend reading large amounts of legal documents on a daliy basis. After this one will definitely see the eitire document as a piece of serious writing.

PS Political implications of the use of colour orange by easyGroup I shall discuss in a separate article (time permitting).

tags: intellectual property, orange, web design, easymobile, webmaster, website development

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 1st, 2006 at 8:53 pm and is filed under Legal, Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.