default: break;

Stories of David and Goliath are common, almost a cliché. The weak, outnumbered, against the almighty giant, a true fairy tale of old and current days.

Goliath struck us a couple of weeks ago, incarnated as T-Mobile. The telecommunications giant apparently holds a Community Trademark on the color magenta and has a track record of intimidating anyone who bares close to their online and offline presence.

It seems that Belacena.com uses a certain tone of magenta that slightly resembles T-Mobile’s logo and trademark color.

As any enlightened person can tell, these are clearly different colors, sites and businesses but that did not stop Goliath from emailing, faxing and fedexing us a letter asking for our acknowledgement that:

1. several elements on our website (belacena.com) as well as the corresponding logo are shown in a color identical or at least very similar to the color magenta;
2. The color magenta is a core element of Deutsche Telekom AG’s corporate identity;
3. T-Mobile offers, among others, a full range of internet based services, such as “inter alia video and music download” (wtf?) services, which overlap the field of database services provided by “belacena.com”, thus promoting a possible misallocation by Internet users of the services provided by us to Deutsche Telekom AG.

Being a hobby of ours, belacena.com has barely proven profitable and none of us has quit our day job because of it. Still, we are honored that such a high-profile telco has spotted us on their radar and has considered our service as a threat to their services. Such a compliment has given us much joy and we hope that they pursue their interests, as we will continue to pursue ours.

We have planned a few changes to our website, none of them derived from this episode. In the meantime, I leave you with an appropriate song: