Who Owns This Color?

It was inevitable that someday, companies would start battling over the exclusive rights to certain colors. After all, marketing research indicates that over 80% of visual information is related to color. One article put it quite eloquently:

The colour of a product, its packaging or the material used to promote it is often a crucial way of distinguishing the goods and services of one trader from those of another. The use of colour in a product or its packaging is widely recognised as being crucial to building a brand image and marketing and advertising agencies agonise long and hard when deciding which colour, or shade accurately reflect the brand values. (source)

Deutsche Telekom, the mother company of T-Mobile, owns the European trademark on a specific color of magenta, to be used within the tele-communications sector.

Here's Deutsche Telekom's registered color data from this pdf list of company trademarked colors.

But people are taking color trademarks the wrong way, and there is outrage on the web.

image source

There's even a fun "Free Magenta" site that has been created in opposition to this demand for exclusivity. My question is, are they for real, or is this merely a parody?

What people need to understand is that a color can be trademarked for branding purposes, but only within the scope of its specific industry niche. This actually isn't all that revolutionary. Owens-Corning has a trademark on the use of pink for insulation, and Tiffany & Co. has a trademark on its signature robin's-egg blue for their jewelry brand. Just think, if a construction company started using tiffany blue on their building materials, this would not affect Tiffany's brand.

I really want to squelch these common misconceptions that spread like wildfires online.