Cadbury loses legal fight over use of colour purple

This is an interesting example of the color trademarking activities we've mentioned in lectures and newsletter articles before.

It appears that both Cadbury and Nestle want to be able to use the color purple for selling candy.

From the color geek point of view it's interesting to note that:

a) the color was specified as Pantone 2865c and
b) Cadbury lost because their "formulation does not comply with the requirements for trademark registration"

Presumably that's color formulation and not chocolate...

Apparently the judge thought that "To allow a registration so lacking in specificity, clarity and precision of visual appearance would offend against the principle of certainty"

I wonder if specifying the color in CIELab would have helped?

We were alerted to the story on the BBC News website but there's a bit more detail on the WSJ website