Depending on how that color palette is used, it could fall into part of Trademark law call Trade Dress. The “look and feel” of a product can be distinct to communicate to consumers what it is and what brand it is. The colors used are part of the Trade Dress. Think about iconic consumer products like iconic Red Bull energy drink can:

Its a skinny 473ml can with the blue and silver colors with the red and yellow Red Bull company logo on it. If you see this even if the letters were in a different language than one you understand, you’d know immediately this is a can of Red Bull. This is Trade Dress.

Does this mean that other companies…

• … can’t use a skinny 473ml can? No.
• … can’t sell energy drinks in cans? No.
• … can’t sell foil covered chocolate bars with blue & silver packaging? No.
• … can’t sell energy drinks, in blue & silver skinny cans? YES!

So the color palette by itself isn’t trademarked under Trade Dress rules, but the color palette is part of a protected Trademark usage.

This podcast episode discusses this very question at length, along with a history of Pantone’s pallette

Generally no, but I wouldn’t rule out that it might be possible in a limited way in very specific circumstances. You wouldn’t be able to stop others from using certain colors.

A specific color scheme might also be used as a trademark.

I don’t think you can copyright a color, per se. You can trademark certain uses of color in certain schemes. For example, the walmart smiley is trademarked, but they can’t go after people just using a yellow smiley. or like, Checker Cabs, with their yellow and black livery. (as mentioned elsewhere, the pantone colorset is trademarked.

Further, you can get patents for pigments- specifically, their production methods, and how they get bound into a solvent or whatever. For an example here- Vanta Black. If someone were to get their hands on some second hand, the people that make it can’t stop them from using it, but they could go after another company producing it the same way they do.

Copyright protections are for works of art (or other works, eh.), and while there are plenty of monochrome works, part of what makes “art” … “art” is composition. For example, in the sampling of monochrome, that first one is a blue panel set inside a white frame. Others, you see the single color is composed of texture. (the Yves Klien painting, for example.) Or, like Gerhard Ricther’s solid gray which was expressly intended to convey… nothing (A lack of emotion or feeling, etc.)

But all of these are more than just the color they’re painted in.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantone

I believe trademark would be the proper area for something like this. I don’t believe it would be enforceable, but could be weaponized to bleed someone of money via court. Not a lawyer.

Anish has entered the chat

Shit, i would own a whole lot to Mr Viridis

There are only 16777216 colors people care about. There are way more people than that in the world. We could live in a colorless society if 0.2% of humans decided to steal all colors