Adobe Just Held a Bunch of Colors Hostage

The author of The End of Ownership is a researcher at the University of Michigan Law School. The shift from products to services erodes consumer ownership and puts us at the mercy of largely unaccountable companies, according to him. He says that there is no intellectual property rights for individual colors or the libraries of which they are a part. The limited trademark rights for specific colors don't apply here either.

The design community is made up of angry people. "They've done it in the worst way possible, and any potential routes that designers and users could follow to try and subvert it, that's what I think."

Over the course of the weekend, he looked at how Adobe's software read the colors. Her conclusion was that the company has measures in place to know when a color is used in a file. The colors are switched to black when it finds a reference.

It is possible for users to work around this by removing any Pantone colors from the swatch used in files and saving them again. The traditional, non-Pantone colors are converted to traditional, non-Pantone colors. If you don't use the Pantone preset for color fidelity, you can convert them to normal colors.

Most people who use Pantone colors use them because printers worldwide standardize the production of colors. There are a lot of screenprints made by me. I need a reference for my printers to make sure we're both talking about the same color. There is no real alternative solution at the moment. The standard is an industry one. It is possible for a manufacturer in the Far East to say that the blue is 660c and they know what I am talking about. That is the entire point.

Semple wants to see if it is possible to not use Pantone's colors. He released Freetone, a collection of 1,280 colors that can be installed into Adobe software as a plug-in. He is careful to not say that they are exact replacements of Pantone colors, only that they are very similar to the real ones. Freetone has been downloaded more than 22,000 times since it was released four days ago.

There is uncertainty about where the fault lies. It's about putting more pressure on Pantone to make a deal Di Leva didn't reply to a question about why the block was implemented in the way it was. The products and services we rely on are not ours to use alone. They are tied to companies like Adobe, Apple, andTesla, who can dictate how we use them through a combination of software code, license terms, and legal threats.

User convenience and experience were sacrificed by the decision. It makes everything more complex. Handoff to other companies and other departments is more difficult because of it. The need to be physically present at a print company in order to check that the end result matches the design is one of the barriers that Pantone tried to avoid.

Adobe needs to take some of the blame for the situation, according to her. She pointed out that she has moved around and deleted the colors in the file. Nothing is preventing them. I think it's a sign that Adobe is trying to create a public uproar at Pantone so they have a better deal. Users should not be dragged into the despute. It's a little bit strange if Adobe and Pantone have a disagreement and I have my files changed.