Photoshop is not a verb | Hacker News Reader

Photoshop is not a verb

adobe.com

32 pointscrasm57 comments

It doesn't matter what the actual status of the word in common usage is, they just have to show they are attempting to protect the trademark so that they can litigate to protect it in specific instances.

Adobe thoroughly enjoys the fact that 'photoshop' is synonymous with image editing. They just have to pretend otherwise. See also band-aid, aspirin, Hoover, Kleenex. (iOS capitalized the last two but not the first two)

Their legal department might disapprove of it, but their marketing department loves it.

Photoshop is a verb.

Adobe's trademark lawyers would very much like it to not be a verb, but it is. They've lost that battle long ago.

I think it's an excellent excuse to try to get people to stop making implicit product recommendations and reinforcing a de facto standard (monpoly?) when they are really just trying to say "photo editing".

Adobe's Creative Suite is a little pet peeve of mine. Many people I know have it illegally (I'm a student, so that says something about the financial capabilities of my peers), and even if they can afford it they say they don't use it professionally or not enough to warrant buying it. Many are even software developers themselves. Some subjects in the study I do even require using Adobe Photoshop specifically, but kindly ask people to buy it rather than supplying a license "because it's too expensive to provide for everyone". (So they think the students can afford it then? I'm quite certain they're just covertly asking us to violate copyright laws here.) If it's all so terribly expensive and apparently we can't negotiate with this overlord, why don't we try to get rid of this industry standard?

Net on the list: Google is not a verb.

$29 per month for the student subscription which includes access to ALL creative cloud products? That isn't expensive at all especially in the context of higher education where a single textbook can cost over $100.

Actually, it's only $20/mo. Or $10/mo if you only want Photoshop/Lightroom.

When I was in college, I bought used books and sold them online as soon as the course was over (unless there was good reason to think I'd use the book again). $29/month is a lot to spend unless you have the time and preexisting skills to use them to make that money back.

I think daily income of an undergraduate level engineer in countries like India is in the 10-15$/day range. It's substantially lower in some African countries. It's pretty strange that the software industry seems incapable of offering software priced by country. Both have marginal reproduction costs. I'd of course recommend using FLOSS software but it's a self feeding vicious circle of "no Photoshop skills no job for you...lol Gimp". I'm pretty sure software "piracy" is gladly accepted in low income countries as long as the corporate/government licenses are bought. That was very much true for Microsoft licenses when I was in Africa. Administrator basically meant Windows-Administrator which was mind boggling since TCO should be in favor of Linux and the like in low income countries but if there's only a tiny pool of admins the TCO rises compared to Windows (due to accepted "piracy"). I thought it was a very interesting (and sad) phenomenon.

I don't think it's terribly expensive if you're a creative professional when you consider the Creative Cloud subscription model. The main reason it has become the standard is because it's so great.

I'm not sure what you mean by "apparently we can't negotiate." There are bulk licensing deals and student discounts. If you're a student, you can get Photoshop and Lightroom for $10/mo. If someone needs it for one course, that's seems pretty affordable.

Also Dutch students doing only semi-related studies? Last time I looked into it, it was a few hundred bucks at least, and more if you used it commercially.

Yes, any Dutch student can get a full Creative Cloud subscription for €19,66/month. That's for the whole suite, I assume you can cherry pick only Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign for a fair bit less. You need either an education related e-mail address, which I didn't have when I went to college (The Netherlands doesn't have something like an .edu.nl extension), but a scan of a university card seems to be valid as well if you read the fine print.

https://creative.adobe.com/nl/plans?plan=edu&store_code=nl

Okay thanks, that's a good argument to use next time I hear someone has it illegally.

$10/mo is the standard price for everyone, not students

Sure it is. Thankfully that's not Adobe's decision to make.

Here is Google's version of Google is not a verb: https://www.google.com/permissions/trademark/rules.html

So your brand got the rare honour of being used in many languages of the world as a verb, burning the brand to peoples heads and then, instead of being damn proud, you publish such a marketing nonsense and slam it in peoples faces? Are you kidding me?? Really, your marketing department thinks this is wrong? Challenge accepted. Let me GIMP your brand out of my mental image.

This is not a marketing page. It's a legal page from their lawyers stating how the brand name should be used, such that they don't loose control over their trademark. You better believe they're damn proud of the fact that their name is being used as a verb. They just have to show that they're defending the brand so that they don't loose their trademark. Google and Kleenex are in the same boat.

While Kleenex is commonly used to refer to any brand of facial tissue, I've never heard of it being used as a verb.

They face the same legal challenge though. Also, you don't Kleenex your face? :)

It's been a few years since I looked at a print version of "Writer's Digest," but there would regularly be ads stating Kleenex was a brand name for facial tissue. A number of companies, like Xerox, would do the same thing to protect their trademarks.

As noted elsewhere, while the legal departments hate it, the marketing departments probably love it.

Here's Google's terms [1]. I just remembered Bing was trying desperately to turn bing into a verb! Bing it, they said.

[1] https://www.google.com/permissions/trademark/rules.html

The verb now has negative connotations, in that anything refereed to as photoshopped means it is obviously badly edited and/or fake looking.

http://imgur.com/a/ot4RV Fake news.

I Photoshop®ped it :p

The lawyers who drafted this must be great fun at parties!

"No smiling, the cake hasn't been cut yet."

Using it correctly will only make you look like an Adobe® Photoshop® shill. No thanks.

So then don't use it except if it's a necessary detail for the story.

Here's an interesting case from the open-source world.

Apache holds the "Apache Maven" trademark. Apache Maven is a build management/automation tool which uses a lot of "plugins".

The peculiar part is that Apache won't let you name your plugin "maven-<foobar>-plugin" whereas "<foobar>-maven-plugin" is allowed. The wording is:

"Calling it maven-<yourplugin>-plugin (note "Maven" is at the beginning of the plugin name) is strongly discouraged since it's a reserved naming pattern for official Apache Maven plugins maintained by the Apache Maven team with groupId org.apache.maven.plugins. Using this naming pattern is an infringement of the Apache Maven Trademark."

https://maven.apache.org/guides/plugin/guide-java-plugin-dev...

To be clear, we're talking about technical naming here, similar to how you'd name a package or an executable file. These names are actually composite, the full plugin name consists of a "groupId" like "com.acme.foo" and "artifactId" like "<foobar>-maven-plugin". For non-"org.apache.maven.plugins" plugins groupdId is mandatory, so "com.acme.foo:maven-foobar-plugin" makes it pretty clear that it's not an Apache development.

I'm a plugin developer who had the bad luck naming my plugin "maven-<foobar>-plugin" before this convention was established. There's an established user base, a lot of documentation, StackOverflow tags etc. There exists also an alternative plugin named "<foobar>-maven-plugin".

But still once in a while I get contacted by someone (from Apache or totally unrelated) who educates me on how the name of my plugin infringes on the Apache Maven Trademark.

I strongly disagree with this and my position was ever since that if Apache wants to enforce this trademark, they are totally welcome to send me a "Cease and Desist" letter. I'll print it out, hang it on the wall and then shut down the project.

I'm mostly disturbed by the sentence "Since Photoshop is a trademark, you should always use it as an adjective only to describe the Adobe products associated with the Photoshop brand.", as Photoshop is clearly a noun.

I have an issue with the whole thing. I think they've already lost the trademark to the language.

  Correct:   The image was enhanced with Adobe® Photoshop® Elements software.
  Incorrect: The image was photoshopped.

I love how they expect people to assert their trademark rights with the ® symbol. Unless this document is aimed at Adobe employees or contractors, that's inappropriate.

Ya, this is bordering on REALTOR® level.

My favorite part is the assumption that Photoshop only ever enhances images.

Ianal, but my sense is that as long as they keep trying to hold back the tide, they're eligible for trademark protection. Once they give up, there's nothing to stop Google Docs Photoshop mode, Microsoft Office Photoshop, or rflrob's awesome photoshop. Though there's nothing that says that vigorous enforcement needs to be mean—see, for example, Jack Daniels: https://brokenpianoforpresident.com/2012/07/19/jack-daniels-...

This is how they want you to use it:

> Trademarks are proper adjectives and should be followed by the generic terms they describe.

> Correct: The image was manipulated using Adobe® Photoshop® software.

> Incorrect: The image was manipulated using Photoshop.

Adobe's own marketing pages consistently use the ostensibly "incorrect" usage though: http://www.adobe.com/au/products/photoshop.html

Someone should alert them that their phone number on the bottom is missing a digit somewhere.

The number is correct, it's an Australian number [0]. Specifically a FreeCall number following the format: 1800 xxx xxx. Not to be confused with the United State's 1-800-xxx-xxxx format. An easy mistake to make if you didn't notice the /au/ in the URL.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_numbers_in_Australia

Hmmm... so in the case of a "dog collar", Adobe would we consider "dog" to be an adjective? Interesting... I never thought about it like that, but I guess that makes sense. Still, they need to work on their definitions.

Grammatically this is known as apposition, where you have two nouns (or noun phrases) next to each other and modifying each other. In English appositives aren't considered adjectives, but they do behave similarly.

I remember reading on Kelloggs box: If it doesn't say Kelloggs on the box, it's not Kelloggs in the box.

Where I live many people call Kelloggs any cereal boxes. I though they should have been proud that their every such product is called by their name.

Pampers also comes to my mind - almost no one calls them diapers - just pampers be it from any manufacturer.

I'm googling how to photoshop this image of pampers & kelloggs.

Columbia Journalism Review used to have full-page advertisements from Xerox that read, "You can't Xerox a Xerox on a Xerox. But you can make a copy on a Xerox-brand copier."

It was effective, in that I remember the ad many years later. But it didn't do much to change the way people use language.

I don't understand how this is a bad thing, I mean to Google is a verb, to Photoshop ® is to edit photos, it means that their product is the absolute best in its category so much so that it became a verb. Most startup folks would kill it to have their product be a synonym with a verb.

Yes it is. And so is google, and table.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY

Not even the title of the article. A little click-bait-y. Expected a blog post from Adobe or something, not to be redirected to their trademark page.

It reminds me of "Legos".

It is a shibboleth, and the "Lego community" is incredibly serious about it, to the point of incivility, but who cares?

The "Lego Community" misses the point, arguing over the pluralization instead of realizing the company doesn't want you using the word to describe the blocks at all.

https://twitter.com/LEGO_Group/status/842115345280294912

But interestingly, everyone I know in Germany says "Lego bricks/stones" (translated to German, of course) but not "Legos" - but maybe it helps we can/must contract many words to one :P

Everyone I know in Germany says "Legos".

Does anyone know when this guidance was first released? I see it cited as far back as 2004 but I seem to remember it earlier than that.

If only Gimp wasn't so odd to use as a verb. Perfect time to start a "Adobe says don't photoshop it" campaign :)

NYT: Photoshopped or Not? A Tool to Tell

Wikipedia: ... the word "photoshop" has become a verb as in "to Photoshop an image," ...

I wonder if Xerox went through the same mental gymnastics on their path down the drain?

Xerox went to great lengths to prevent their trademark becoming generic in just this way. In the west, they succeeded, and so fell into obscurity—but at least with their trademark mostly intact. In India, where we in Australia would use the verb “photocopy”, they use the verb “xerox”. And a fair few of the machines actually are by Xerox (though far from all of them).

Well fine, i'll just say, "this image was fireworked!" Oh wait...

lol xD

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