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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

Paying Pantone for the work they put into developing a calibrated colour system across printers, inks and sub-straits isn’t “crappy”.

Adobe pulling a product feature from paid customers existing install/subscription because they failed to licence the feature properly from the supplier is crappy.

Pantone is, in my option, being somewhat unduly attacked for this change. This is 100% on Adobes head.

Pantone have been a popular punching bag for the design industry for 30 years. And it may be true they over charge for what they offer. But this is Adobes f*up.

Frankly, a 1:1 mapping of Pantone to Freetone sounds like copyright infringement.

What I would love to see is a new “free”/libra/open colour system, superseding what Pantone offer. Let’s not just copy people because we feel slighted.

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They can and do charge for products related to actually making the colors. That doesn't mean they should get paid for which RGB code looks close.

And the idea of copyrighting colors is ridiculous.

> idea of copyrighting colors is ridiculous

Absolutely, however at least here in the UK (and I suspect the EU), copying the Pantone colour book would be classed as copying a “database”. Databases are copyrightable, whether you agree with that or not.

My argument is rather than doing something that drags the copyright debate into to situation just make something better and “free as in beer and speech”.

Copying something that is “copyright” to “free it” puts you on the back foot. You will loos the argument eventually.

I agree. Having such an essential collection gated behind a copyright is a net detriment to humanity. Imagine if collection known as a SI system of units was owned by a corporation and you had to pay a license to use it.

Be careful with your wording. In some places databases are IP, but database rights are not copyright.

And you could still install individual colors in that case, right? The average project shouldn't have many.

Pantone isn't copyrighting the colors, they're copyrighting the collection. It's similar to copyrighting a map: you're not claiming that all representations of this part of the world now belong to you, you're claiming that this representation belongs to you.

It does seem like Adobe could have mapped the colors in existing files to a useful hex code instead of blacking them all out.

The issue is that map from "named colors" to "useful colors" is sufficiently protected that approximations could run afoul of whatever agreement Adobe and Pantone have in place.

Most likely, yes. There's a non-trivial amount of work that goes into ensuring that colors show up correctly in every medium, and Pantone will absolutely want to prevent other people from copying the mappings that they spent time and money developing. As OP said, though, that doesn't make them the bad guys. Adobe is the one who failed to take care of their customers.

I think your comment is outrage caused by a lack of understanding of the product.

They don’t copyright the color. The copyright the product associated with the color.

You can use the same RGB or CMYK colors. You however don’t get the guarantees of what the spectral responses of that color are and you don’t get the guarantees of printers having palettes to match the color.

Copyrighting a product? What are you talking about? You can get trademarks on some things, but copyrights are not relevant here.

I can tell a printer to color match a pantone swatch without violating anything.

I think you are overlooking the fact that Adobe is offering a subscription service. And one of the downsides of doing that is that organizations that license stuff to you (like Pantone) have a bigger leverage over you, because eevoking the license will remove their IP from all of the users, not just the ones with new versions of the software.

Whithout having put any research into this at all, it would not surprise me if Pantone tried to use that lever.

I’m sure that did, as any of us would in their position.

Adobe should have anticipated this and ensures they had perpetual licensing in place. It’s ridiculous that the largest graphics technology company in the world have managed this so badly.

Frankly I don't know why Adobe haven’t either acquired Pantone at some point in the past or developed their own alternative standard. It’s such a blind sport for them.

The company that owns Pantone is worth about $90 billion. It's more likely to go the other way.

Danaher, their patent, is many times larger (and significantly more diverse) than Pantone which was acquired for $180m in 2007. Adobe should have acquired them then. Assuming no growth they would be worth around $250m now. Well within the reach of Adobe.

I'm referring to Danaher. My point is it's too late. They're not going to sell something that commands $10k for spindles of plastic chips. It prints money.

Why is it too late?

Why would Danaher sell it? It's more likely Danaher would buy Adobe for the same reason it bought Pantone. Synergy!

The problem isn't really related to subscriptions. Adobe Soundbooth, the precursor to Audition, was a paid for product with a perpetual license, but still they pulled major features for failing to license some crucial libraries. Notably, this happened to installed programs. A few years later, the program wouldn't start at all (still the same installation).

> Frankly, a 1:1 mapping of Pantone to Freetone sounds like copyright infringement.

I would argue that the Pantone colour library is effectively an API for reproducing specific colours as paint (with the context that APIs are largely protected under fair use).

Pantone should be compensated for what they do. They should have the option to recoup their costs but not necessarily by restricting others from using their published digital interface for colour-to-paint reproduction.

They should be able to maintain IP rights for the tooling they build to faithfully reproduce those colours as paint and their trademark should obviously be protected but the actual colour codes themselves? How is that any different than say Google using the same API for Oracle's Java for their alternative JDK & JVM?

At the end of the day in both cases, the useful part isn't the API/colour codes but the tech used to actually run Java/reproduce those colours faithfully as paint.

> I would argue that the Pantone colour library is effectively an API for reproducing specific colours as paint

I would roughly say that Pantone is a specific arrangement of a set of specific items, with the arrangement intentionally conveying a unique meaning to the set. Just like a book or a picture or song or a piece of code.

(IANAL, I don't intend that definition to stand up in courts, just describing how and why it makes sense to me that it could or should be treated the same way)

While it is Adobe’s fault for implementing really poorly, there has to be some blame on creators making works using the Pantone palette without really understanding what it’s for and the fact that it is licensed, presenting risk that it won’t necessarily be available in the future.

A lot of people used the colors as just a nice useful palette. In hindsight that was never a good idea.

Are you sure about that? Most people I know who used Pantone colors were using them because their print product used one of those as a (special) spot color. You cannot print metallic copper on just any CMYK printer no matter how much you fiddle with the numbers. When you want a color to look as close as possible to a certain thing using a spot color (Pantone or otherwise) is the way to go.

You just answered it yourself. Most people you know, what about the other people? What do they use it for? Not it’s intended use, whatever it is, which is part of my point (the other part is understanding the risk of vendor lock-in).

The other people don't use it at all. They use the color selector or the default swatches.

I know no person who uses pantone seatches and does not know about spot colors. And my environment are self thought people not professional graphic designers.

But aren't they already getting licensing fees from printer and color mixer manufacturers? Requiring someone to pay just to be able to specify "I want this thing painted with Pantone XYZ" sounds like double-dipping to me.

They don’t require a license fee in order to specify an area as a specific colour. You could literally write it on as an instruction to your printer. I have literally done that.

They charge Adobe for the right to include their database of colours in their software. Adobe failed to negotiate a sustainable relationship, and sold a product to customers under the pretence of including the Pantone database, then pulled it.

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