Don't want to defend any practice here. But this looks like two different things to me. Vantablack is a product (not just a color) which is exclusively licensed

Don't want to defend any practice here. But this looks like two different things to me. Vantablack is a product (not just a color) which is exclusively licensed to the artist by the manufacturer. If someone comes up with it's own product reproducing the same results these can still can be bought and used for art (and given the wiki entry this happened). Whereas in this article it appears to me that they trademarked the appearance of a color, resulting in other parties changing their recipe to not appear too similar, which I find a bit more problematic.