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Wed, 11 Dec 2019
Trolling The Trademark Troll: Lemonade CEO Releases Chrome Extension To Remove Magenta From Websites
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You will recall that last month we discussed the latest iteration of T-Mobile's ongoing war to defend its trademark on the color magenta, as well as close variants of that color. While there are instances in which a particularly unique color or shade of color can be trademarked by a company, this case involved T-Mobile's parent company, Deutsche Telekom, bullying insurance company Lemonade out of using the color magenta in its branding. Given that the insurance and mobile phone industries are quite disparate, this never should have been a dispute, regardless of how ridiculous it is for a company to have exclusive rights to a color like magenta.The folks at Lemonade appear to agree. While the company complied with Telekom's C&D, it also launched a PR blitz to highlight how insane this all is. First, Lemonade launched its #FreeThePink campaign to raised public awareness, and is taking its case to EUIPO to try and invalidate the trademark. But that wasn't all. The staff of Lemonade has now released a Chrome browser extension that, ahem, helps enact T-Mobile's vision of being the only purveyor of pink out there.Pending the decision of European IP authorities, a Lemonade employee, Itamar Kestenbaum, wrote a Chrome extension called Pink-Out.In fact, it's fair to say that Kestenbaum primarily wanted to showcase Deutsche Telekom's appalling behavior.What the extension – essentially designed to troll the troll – does is strip all webpages, except those belonging to the German company itself, of “questionable shades.” The app itself claims it helps those browsing the internet to be "pink-compliant", chiefly as a way to highlight the absurdity of all of this. In addition, the extension's page says that with a click of a button all pink is removed from the depiction of public websites, except those owned by T-Mobile. The page concludes with:This extension is free -- like the color pink should be. I'll give the company this: they're certainly making Lemonade out of the magenta-hued lemons T-Mobile has handed them.
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posted at: 12:00am on 11-Dec-2019
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