His purpleness lives on in the courts…
The Fashion Blog reports
In August 2017, Pantone created a new color. The small company headquartered about an hour outside of Manhattan in Carlstadt, New Jersey is known for its practice of coding colors and selling them as part of its Pantone Matching System, a proprietary standardization guide on “all things color.” Unlike its usual “Colors of the Year” (for 2018, it’s ultra violet) or its routinely-introduced seasonal colors, this one was different. The custom hue, a “distinct” deep purple, was created for Prince.
As Pantone noted that summer in conjunction with the late singer’s estate, “Prince’s association with the color purple was galvanized in 1984 with the release of the film Purple Rain, along with its Academy Award-winning soundtrack featuring the eponymous song. While the spectrum of the color purple will still be used in respect to the ‘Purple One,’ Love Symbol #2, will be the official color across the brand he left behind.”
Now, Prince’s estate and Paisley Park Enterprises, the late star’s main business company, want to legally claim the color as their own (in addition, of course, to any common law rights they already maintain in the color as a result of Prince’s use of it since the 1980’s; remember, trademark rights in the U.S. are borne by way of use of the mark and not simply by being the first to register it). To be exact, the Prince-affiliated parties filed an application for registration with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”) this month for “the color purple” for use on “musical sound [and] musical video recordings,” “motion picture films featuring music and musical entertainment,” and “entertainment services, namely, live performances,” “operating a museum and providing guided tours of the museum,” among other things.
Yes, a Prince museum might be coming! (A follow up to the Brooklyn Museum’s David Bowie exhibition, maybe?)
