And UPS has a trademark on brown delivery trucks: http://www.ups.com/media/en/trademarks.pdf It's limited in scope and serves to distinguish the brand. Seems reasonable to protect it.
> Yellow is awfully broad: In my mind, multimeters have always been yellow. I’ve never had the opportunity to own a Fluke-branded DMM so I’m not sure where my brain picked up this association. I can respect trademarks and company branding and I respect Fluke’s reputation for high-quality multimeters. If Fluke wants to own a color I would expect the USPTO to require them to assign an exact color just like Tiffany’s did with Tiffany Blue. But allowing a company to trademark ‘yellow’ seems broad.
This is the diagram in the trademark filing, describing what kind of yellow border is covered:
My current multimeter is blue. The previous one was yellow. It's predecessor was black.
In any case, the punishment seems a little harsh. They could probably arrive an arrangement where the yellow parts would be replaced by some other color and the multimeters could still be sold. Warning shots are acceptable practice.
