
Photoshop is not a verb - crasm
https://www.adobe.com/legal/permissions/trademarks.html
======
robotresearcher
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)

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

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adambrenecki
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.

~~~
lucb1e
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?

~~~
briandear
$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.

~~~
kriro
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.

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

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

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geff82
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.

~~~
hrayr
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.

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

~~~
5555624
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.

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tdy721
[http://imgur.com/a/ot4RV](http://imgur.com/a/ot4RV) Fake news.

~~~
c8g
I Photoshop®ped it :p

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

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

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

~~~
lucb1e
So then don't use it except if it's a necessary detail for the story.

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orless
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...](https://maven.apache.org/guides/plugin/guide-java-plugin-
development.html)

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.

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johnhenry
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.

~~~
crasm
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.

~~~
wl
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.

~~~
tempestn
Ya, this is bordering on REALTOR® level.

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jve
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.

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

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reuven
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.

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thewhitetulip
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.

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

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY](https://youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY)

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lostgame
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.

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Tomte
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?

~~~
wink
[https://twitter.com/LEGO_Group/status/842115345280294912](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

~~~
Tomte
Everyone I know in Germany says "Legos".

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syphilis2
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.

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

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tim333
NYT: Photoshopped or Not? A Tool to Tell

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

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

~~~
chrismorgan
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).

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

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aszantu
lol xD

