Black incognito logo potential problem

So I am aware the logo was changed in May to a completely black logo.
Personally I do not think this is good because new users get confused by this. I got confused when I saw it but also someone else I introduced to incognito had the same experience. It also doesn’t really make it look memorable.
However, this argument has been brought up in the forum several times before and the core team didn’t feel the need to change the logo for this reason and that’s all fine.

However… I have another argument against this logo and I was wondering if the core team has thought of this. It has to do with trademarks. Now, my knowledge of law doesn’t go far beyond the European Union law, but I assume trademark law isn’t much different outside of the EU. And as a company with a logo (trademark) you would want to register this in the EU and other countries eventually anyways.

The main reason for this is if Incognito becomes big you do NOT want the situation where people could just make clones of incognito (or phishing attempts) for example or for whatever other reason use the incognito logo. When a trademark is registered it is easier to take down projects/websites that use the logo.

The problem with the black logo however is that according to (at least) EU trademark law, just a colour (and probably also just a colour in a circle) is in almost all cases not eligible for registering as a trademark. The reason for this is that it wouldn’t have enough of a distinctive character. The only way a colour can be registered is when people really link a company with that specific colour. So in this case it would mean that if you ask the average person on the street to say something about the colour black and show them this logo, they would say “ah yeah that’s incognito”.

My question is, has this problem been considered when changing the logo?

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4 posts were merged into an existing topic: Can we make a poll on the new logo?