Re: reverse engineering a color?

From: <Greg.MacGowan[_at_]Law.UC.Edu>
Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 15:59:06 -0500

The way I read the original question (and I apologize for not explicating this in the beginning), David was suggesting that copyright be given in the resultant color produced by the mixtures of paints and pigments (or, I might add, digital values in a computer application). So even though a paint manufacturer may claim protection in the particular mixture used to produce the resultant color, the color itself should fall outside the scope of copyright since colors are naturally occurring and not original works of authorship. Any attempt to reproduce a particular color is only a matter of sweat and not creativity. This would mean that the paint manufacturer could only rely on trade secret or patent in the *process* used to produce the color, or trademark in the _use_ of the color as in Qualitex, but not the color itself.

To address Gerry's comments below: The beauty of the color-analyzer, as I understand it, is that it doesn't need to analyze the _paint_ itself, it only needs to analyze the _color_ of the paint by assigning numeric values to the shades of the colors, and then combining these values.

Pretty neat, huh? (-:

Greg S. MacGowan

---

Greg S. MacGowan
Assistant Director
Center for Electronic Text in the Law (CETL) P.O. Box 210142
University of Cincinnati College of Law
Cincinnati, OH 45221-0142

phone: (513) 556-2334
fax: (513) 556-6265
Email: Greg.MacGowan[_at_]Taft.Law.UC.edu

"A word to the wise ain't neccessary; it's the stupid ones who need the advice." -- Bill Cosby

> Greg S. MacGowan <greg.macgowan[_at_]law.uc.edu> wrote:
>>
>> You're suggesting that we make colors copyrightable. Probably not a good
>> idea. (-:
>
> How about trade secret law? Suppose there were an express license on
> the exterior of the paint can stating that the particular mixture
> was a trade secret and opening the can was the user's manifestation
> of acceptance of the license to use, but not analyze, the paint...?
>
> Gerry Bluhm
> gbluhm[_at_]cfa.harvard.edu
>
>> On Wed, 16 Oct 1996, David Dailey wrote:
>> >
>> > The recent discussion on this list of reverse engineering software and
>> > a visit to a local hardware store triggered the following thoughts:
>> >
>> > The hardware store, part of a regional chain, has a wonderful gadget:
>> > a "color-analyzer." The customer brings in a sample of the paint they
>> > want to match, the machine takes a picture, and then
>> > "reverse-engineers" the mixing of pigments to produce a match. In my
>> > case, I had some paint from manufacturer A, but the store only sold
>> > paint by manufacturer B. Given the status of color as potentially
>> > trademarkable entity (see Qualitex Co. v. Jacobson Products Co. Inc.,
>> > in which the U.S. Supreme Court allowed a claim of trademark
>> > infringement on a color), I was wondering if this wonderful device
>> > might indeed be naughty.
>> >
>> > It is not too different, it seems, from the protection of a small set
>> > of parameters in software: a paint color can be seen as an n-tuple
>> > consisting of ratios of n various primary pigments, though perhaps the
>> > set of basic primaries varies from company to company. I gather that
>> > with parameters in software, some are arguing for copyright status. If
>> > so, why not for colors too? and would the proposed reverse engineering
>> > statututes extend to parameter sets? Just musing a bit...
>> >
>> > David Dailey (ddailey[_at_]williams.edu)
Received on Wed Oct 30 1996 - 21:00:52 GMT