This was first posted on April 14, 2008. Cadbury is purple in the face over not being able to secure the wordlwide exclusive rights to the use of the color purple in association with the sale of chocolate — even as against an Australian company that’s been using the two together for almost a century:
10 Years of LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION®
Cadbury tells me it is “vigorously appealing” against a judgment over the use of purple. In a case that it has pursued for five years, Cadbury has tried and failed to stop Darrell Lea, an Australian chocolate manufacturer, from using the colour.
Despite the fact that Darrell Lea was established in 1927 and has been using purple for most of its existence, Cadbury insists that it has no right to the colour. Cadbury has registered one shade of purple in relation to block chocolate in tablet form in Britain but it has not been as successful elsewhere.
Purple, actually, may be the oldest legally-protected “trademark” color, of sorts. The color was, at certain times during ancient times and antiquity, permitted to be worn only by the nobility. To which, in the chocolate sense, Cadbury may or may not have a claim. I do like the stuff, and perhaps it is among the elite in the chocolate hierarchy. Certainly compared to virtually anything else the English make it is uniquely edible — but regal?
Cadbury is purple in the face over not being able to secure the wordlwide exclusive rights to the use of the color purple in association with the sale of chocolate — even as against an Australian company that’s been using the two together for almost a century:
Purple, actually, may be the oldest legally-protected “trademark” color, of sorts. The color was, at certain times during ancient times and antiquity, permitted to be worn only by the nobility. To which, in the chocolate sense, Cadbury may or may not have a claim. I do like the stuff, and perhaps it is among the elite in the chocolate hierarchy. Certainly compared to virtually anything else the English make it is uniquely edible — but regal?
