Comment on Are color palettes subject to copyright protection?
umbraroze@slrpnk.net 3 days ago
Colour palettes are collections of facts. Facts don’t have copyright protection and ability to claim copyright for a collection is pretty tenuous. However, copyright may apply to certain related things.
For example: Suppose you see that someone is selling a Photoshop colour palette for money, and included the entire palette in the store image. In that case, there’s literally nothing, legally speaking, stopping someone from prodding the image with a colour picker a bunch of times. But there would be copyright protection for the Photoshop palette file itself, because that’s a more tangible piece of data.
There are also other kinds of intellectual property laws that apply to colours. Pantone gets away with whatever shenanigans they’re doing because of trademarks.
mr_jawa@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Designer here - this above comment is 100% correct. The nuance is important that if a particular color palette is used in an original and distinguishable artwork that can be subject to copyright, although it’s a gray area. Colors can be trademarked however and that’s done all the time; for example McDs Red and yellow, UPS brown, The yellow of 3Ms stickies, DHLs red and yellow are examples. Those colors are only contestable if you use them on a similar product. You can color your dog house UPS brown without issue, but you wouldn’t get away with (for long) creating a delivery company with vans that color brown.