It's a bit like writing recipes - the ingredients list can't be copywrited but how you present the recipe, use of grammar, font, descriptions can be. The colours are like the ingredients. My belief would be the name of "Passionate Pink" as an example could be but not the colour value.

ETA: Pantone have had forms of copyright on colours names etc for ever. This site would be no different.

Actually, "Passionate Pink" would not be copyrightable any more than any title or short phrase. Book titles, for instance, are not protected by copyrights. It might be trademarkable if it applied to something that needed to be distinguished. It would be a stretch but if you could prove passionate pink was integral to the functionality of a design patent I guess you could try for one.

I think you are all getting the three primary types of intellectual property mixed together. There are copyrights, trademarks and patents. Within patents there are several "sub-species" like utility, plant and design patents. Trademarks were created to protect a company's investment in what we now call branding and more importantly to protect the public from similar looking things that might even cause harm or at the very least market confusion. A lot of trademark law dates back to the days of medicines and potions being sold off the back of wagons. Copyrights of course protect written words, their visual presentation, drawings and things like music and video recordings and even performances.

Intellectual property does not diminish creativity and can actually encourage it. I know we have now experienced a couple of decades where we would like to think anything we find on the internet---or elsewhere---is or should be public domain and free for the taking. How absurd. What possible incentive is there for creating intellectual property with perhaps the horrid goal of making some money and paying some folks who help in the process if it is there to be stolen? Blatantly and with no remorse.

If you park your car in a public lot does that mean you should not be upset if someone decides they want to use it or otherwise make it their own? And yet, we think screwing the janitor and the lowly mixing panel person at a recording studio out of their share of say music when we steal it is alright? Why should we feel compelled to compensate the illustrator for pencils, ink or watercolor if he or she was dumb enough to share portfolio samples on the internet? Certainly photographers deserve no royalties and we should make them stop watermarking their images!

Or as is the current trend we whine about getting our hands slapped for patent, copyright and trademark infringement? We should be able to take whatever we find and make it ours in the name of creativity? Come on you cannot really believe this?

All that said, this whole patent trolling nonsense is spilling over into copyrights and trademarks. On the one hand you would think a company would do an intellectual property search before investing heavily in product, website, branding or whatever design? On the other we seem to have produced yet another litigious society product with attorneys pursuing people for nothing close to the public good and with no interest in the intellectual property itself.

It is important that all of us learn the basics of innovation and its translation to intellectual property. We know better than to claim ignorance and getting all fired up about whether color is protected by one form of protection or the other serves no purpose. All we really have to do is play fair with the intellectual property we have and our willingness to share, for royalties or not---if inappropriate. Trace illustrations and photographs back to their origins. There is great, free, software for doing this. If you find a fully functional website with layout and color you like, and the creator is willing to share it all with you what is the big deal about slipping the person a few bucks and getting clean useage rights?

Just Perfect Color wrote:

Intellectual property does not diminish creativity and can actually encourage it. I know we have now experienced a couple of decades where we would like to think anything we find on the internet---or elsewhere---is or should be public domain and free for the taking. How absurd. What possible incentive is there for creating intellectual property with perhaps the horrid goal of making some money and paying some folks who help in the process if it is there to be stolen? Blatantly and with no remorse.

If you park your car in a public lot does that mean you should not be upset if someone decides they want to use it or otherwise make it their own? And yet, we think screwing the janitor and the lowly mixing panel person at a recording studio out of their share of say music when we steal it is alright? Why should we feel compelled to compensate the illustrator for pencils, ink or watercolor if he or she was dumb enough to share portfolio samples on the internet? Certainly photographers deserve no royalties and we should make them stop watermarking their images!

I agree in principle, but I think this sort of thinking falls short of the ground reality for most people trying to survive in a bad economy. Consider the mom'n'pops store. Being a part of one, I am in a position where I have every intention to learn about and follow common rules of decency when it comes to intellectual property (which is why I came here in the first place), and yet, I frankly overlook some of the things my dad does because it is completely unrealistic for an actual small business to "do an intellectual property search before investing heavily in product, website, branding or whatever design" as you suggest. I'm not even sure what that entails, and for you to expect me to would be strange. And by actual small business, I mean to distinguish from how the term "small" business is typically used for companies with a 100 or more employees. To us brick'n'mortar retailers, it feels like being in the shadow of giants.

Intellectual property should, like anything made with time, energy and effort, be protected, but I feel that the laws concerning it were made with these sort of larger companies in mind. I agree that these laws don't necessarily limit creativity itself. But some common sense here would be appreciated, the lack of which is what sometimes leads to some of us "whining" since it feels like these laws are suffocating the bud of creativity.

No one learns a thing without first copying in their minds the knowledge of thousands of years of human learning, whether it be in schools or otherwise. The trick is working out where and when this copying is no longer to be tolerated.