UPS says it has a copyright on the color brown.

[Atman]

21. But I actually agreed with you, although not entirely.

Many generic brands will MIMIC the color schemes of established brands. But they're usually clearly generic, and no brand confusion is established. For instance, if you were making a generic chocolate milk powder, would you not use brown as a predominate color? No one is saying you're trying to fool a customer...you have Nestle's Quik taking up seven selves, and you have Store Brand taking up two rows. With store logo on it. No one is going to be "fooled" that they thought they were buying Quik but wound up with store brand.

Not the same with national, established brand identities which took years, decades, generations to build. In fact, Nestle probably makes the chocolate powder for the store brand, so they're still making millions.

But if I were to start up a shipping company tomorrow using all brown vans, using the same brown, with the same yellow logo, don't you see how customers could be ripped off by trucks pulling into their driveway and picking up packages they never intended to be sent via my new upstart company?

I don't think this is exactly rocket science. It's consumer protection.