Can You Copyright Colors? What Businesses Need to Know
Color is probably the first thing a customer notices about a brand, long before they read a logo or a tagline. Some brands instantly becomes recognizable by consumers without a single word attached to them. This strong visual link naturally leads many business owners to ask whether they can copyright colors the way they would opt for designing a logo or creating a tagline. However, the honest answer is more nuanced, because intellectual property law treats different colors very differently from creative works. Can Colors Be Protected by Copyright? As a general rule, a single color cannot be protected by copyright. Copyright exists to protect original creative works such as artwork, music, photography, written content, and software code- essentially. This means you can copyright anything that reflects a minimum level of human creativity. A plain color often fails this test because it is not an original expression created by an individual. Simply a property of light that already e...