Colours: Regulation and Ownership

Abstract

Attempts to regulate or claim ownership of colours have met with limited success. A complicating factor has been the lack of clear definitions. There is more than one kind of colour - related, but distinct. In this paper, seven different kinds of colour are described together with the means used to identify individual colours. It is the means used to identify a colour which determine what kind of colour it is that is being identified. These definitions clarify the issues in a number of case histories, for example: why it was difficult to enforce the law against brides wearing crimson in Renaissance Florence; why his patent on a mauve dye was of limited value to William Henry Perkin; why disputes over colours as company trademarks are so prolonged and so inconclusive. These distinctions may also help to clarify the issues in the current debate about the desirability, or otherwise, of regulating colour in the built environment.