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It's amazing that Pantone and Ral managed to get away with copyrighting something so fundemantal. Surely these should be international standards, like centremetres or Celsius.

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Copyright is something automatic, it's also not like these companies have copyrighted the "color", but the mapping between color and description. The only way they wouldn't have a copyright is if they get challenged in court and loose. There is also a serious difference between RAL and Patone, RAL is managed by a non-profit corporation.

Is there much of a difference in the cost of it compared to pantone or some other system? I know pantone has more colours and seems to be added to more often, based on the wiki page.

RAL doesn't cost anything to use, as far as I know; like, people just make RAL 6018 filament for printing "Festool Green" stuff and put RAL 6018 on the product spec. They offer some certification stuff for more integrated uses and might have some licensing for software uses, I think? But the survival advice for Pantone is "duck and cover"; RAL has no such rep.

My RAL color fan (got mostly in order to match filament to colors) was $26.

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