An interesting example of property rights here. Many will have heard of Pantone colours - as wiki notes 'its Pantone Matching System (PMS), a proprietary color space used in a variety of industries, notably graphic design, fashion design, product design, printing and manufacturing and supporting the management of color from design to production, in physical and digital formats, among coated and uncoated materials, cotton, polyester, nylon and plastics.'
To date it's been built into a range of apps, but, there's trouble ahead.
Pantone asserts that their lists of color numbers and pigment values are the intellectual property of Pantone and free use of the list is not allowed.[45] This is frequently held as a reason Pantone colors cannot be supported in open-source software and are not often found in low-cost proprietary software.[46] Pantone has been accused of "being intentionally unclear" about its exact legal claims, but it is acknowledged that "the simplest claim would be trademark misappropriation or dilution towards someone who produced a color palette marketed as compatible with Pantone's".[46]
By contrast, intellectual property scholar Aaron Perzanowski claims that Pantone has no intellectual property rights over individual colors or color libraries.[47]
In 2022, a dispute between Pantone and Adobe resulted in the removal of Pantone color coordinates from Photoshop and Adobe's other design software, causing colors in graphic artists' digital documents to be replaced with black unless artists paid Pantone a separate $15 monthly subscription fee.[47] Artists accused Adobe and Pantone of holding their work hostage, and UK artist Stuart Semple responded by releasing Freetone, a freeware clone of Pantone's color lists for use with Adobe software. [47]
Semple has done some interesting things, not least producing the world's blackest black. Freetone is pretty great, with as he says 'very Pantone-is colours'.
And:
1280 Liberated colours are extremely Pantoneish and reminiscent of those found in the most iconic colour book of all time. In fact it's been argued that they are indistinguishable from those behind the Adobe paywall.
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