This is not about the colors, FYI. This is about someone referencing a specific Pantone product as a spot color. And the automatic conversion from that spot color name to the regular RGB / CMYK color values is now gone. But if you embedded the actual RGB/CMYK values into your file, then it'll still open just fine and display those colors just fine.
Edit: Also, converting from Pantone to regular RGB/CMYK is a lot more lossy than one would think. If I reference a Pantone product, that pretty much covers all properties of the printed surface, including things like reflectivity angles, fluorescence and phosphorescence. A cheap xRite will already measure reflectivity in 13 wavelength bands. And then it'll average those 13 characteristics into 3 RGB numbers. Professional color measurement tools can have hundreds of properties per ink type, thereby making reduction to 3 values even more lossy.
If I give you RGB, that merely specifies the color at direct reflection under normal light. If I give you a Pantone ID, you also now how it'll look from the side or under UV light. RGB specifies an averaged wavelength mixture, Pantone specifies a chemical ink mixture.
Edit2: You know these car paints that have fresnel reflections, meaning they appear to have a different color of you look at them from a different angle? That's an excellent example of a case where you need to specify a specific ink type like Pantone, because the RGB value changes based on the viewing angle.
If you want to know lots about how materials interact with light to look the way they do, including how the Fresnel effect contributes, there was a great talk at the Blender conference this morning about it.
The fresnel lens/effect is used in a number of places
- Those "invisibility shields" you see videos of
- In (vision) glasses, to correct for double vision (you can get prism in the glasses or, if the double vision is too much for that, a sticky "fresnel" lens that gets attached to the glass. I have one setting on my desk that I was using before my corrective surgery, actually... woo, tangents)
Augustin-Jean Fresnel was an engineer and physicist who made major contributions to the field of optics. As a result, many different things are named after him.
I am more familiar with "Fresnel" being a shading technique responsible for "rim lighting" in computer graphics, that's because this is an application of Fresnel equations, discovered by Fresnel. But in other fields, "Fresnel" can mean something else entirely, with the only thing in common being that it can be traced back to the work of Fresnel.
I posted the original tweet. The problem is with a spot color channel, which I created in the first place by picking a color name from a color book 20 years ago. Now, the on-screen color (PANTONE 130 CVC, an old color name) goes black in Photoshop 2023, but is still a recognisable yellow in an older Photoshop 2022. Without the screen reference, you don't know what it's supposed to look like, so designers working with multiple spot colors could have a tricky time.
Is there any more open standard than Pantone that expresses color properties across viewing angles/lighting conditions? Like in the 3d digital modelling space maybe?
But if it does, I am not sure how useful it would be because the effort to get an ink/paint that met all those requirements would be at least as complex as the Pantone factory.
Probably more complex since Pantone designs colors for the production facilities they have in existence (or can procure).
Basically the problem is who will make the color you specified?
There are problems with Pantone, but availability is not ordinarily among them.
There is no "open source" because it is a shitton of work someone has to pay for it and actively manage, and open source means anyone else could just take your income source (selling the paint catalogs) and re-make it cheaper.
If you're buying a lot you can just design the color, get a bunch of samples mixed and pick one.
Hell, you could go to good paint shop and get anything you want matched and get a recipe for it, that's how car can be painted to match the paint that changed the color with age.
A paint shop does not perform the testing required to confirm a paint meets the classes of specifications the GP of your comment describes.
Achieving that level of known properties requires equipment, personnel, and materials beyond what would make commercial sense outside of the market segment in which the cost of Pantone systems make sense.
To put it another way, cost of entry is Pantone’s moat and why it has been filling the same market segment for many decades…where $21/month is pretty much no different than free.
Also a paint shop does not do that for free. I remember going to one and while talking to the owner his subordinate kept walking up and asking if this is the right color (they were matching) and the owner said, I think it needs a bit more ... 5 minutes later he would come back and show him and keep iterating. I don't think you can always just put some paint sample under a light and have a computer spit out RGB. It takes time and IS expensive to match paint, especially automotive, etc..
The term for that is a bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF). No idea about libraries of BRDFs for common materials but considering how even games have moved to physically-based rendering there must be.
Modern PBR specifically doesn’t really rely on artists choosing a BRDF though. The idea is to pick one that’s accurate, and expose a handful of variables to control it (roughness and metalness mostly)
RAL has some serious coverage gaps. Classic RAL has crummy oranges and pinks, for example (though they did recently fill a major gap with HN-orange-ish, it's not in my deck, so it may as well not exist!). Design D2 is much, much better, but still not really adequate in many areas that Pantone does cover.
But RAL is definitely the better choice for anything but printing... if it has your color (colour?).
> If I give you RGB, that merely specifies the color at direct reflection under normal light
Not exactly. What primaries? What gamma? What max intensity?
Sure, many of these things have generally accepted defaults. But point being it's still not that simple. But really, RGB only seems exact because it produces one specific color on the monitor in front of you. And it's nowhere close to being able to represent the full gamut of possible colors. For example, it's missing all violets!
This is the real story behind Pantone colors. I've blocked / downvoted all those "experts" on twitter who are saying "here's a chart of hex equivalents."
I don't understand - in lieu of paying for a Pantone subscription, isn't the next best option to use RGB and just separately log what the final printed spot Pantone will be? Maybe I misunderstand why you dislike the hex equivalents chart.
People saying “just convert to RGB” are kinda missing the point. RGB can’t be used for printing-typically you’ll send CMYK separations.
Unfortunately, the color gamut of CMYK is quite limited. If you have a print job that requires a very specific color, say, for your logo, it can be cheaper to order a black and spot color print run. If the color is out of gamut, you have to provide a spot color.
That spot color, at least in the US, was always specified in PANTONE.
RGB is used for describing the colour of light if you are a web developer like me you will never need anything else. CMYK is used for printed colours that reflect light and as such there isn't a direct correlation between them.
For example RGB blue #0000ff is so bright it can not be printed, if you tried it would look a lot darker blue than the screen shows. This issue with printed colours looking different from screen space colours is that printed colours will also look different depending on the surface they are printed onto and a variety of other variable.
Your work around is fine for me as I work in RGB and would really only need the Pantone when im printing once every 5 years? If you are a print designer then you will be using the colours all day every day and having to switch or a reference that isn't exact results in expensive printing mistakes.
By having a mapping to RGB values and a calibrated monitor.
This of course then only gives an approximation. However this isn't typically used for digital output, but the pantone ID is carried along so that when printing (or otherwise producing) the physical object the correct color and material is being used.
(And some 3D rendering/CAD tool might also deal with reflections etc. in digital space)
> converting from Pantone to regular RGB/CMYK is a lot more lossy than one would think
From what I briefly read, a large chunk of Pantone doesn't even fit in CMYK:
> About 30% of the Pantone system's 1114 spot colors (as of year 2000) cannot be simulated with CMYK but with 13 base pigments (14 including black) mixed in specified amounts.
These 1114 spot colors are apparently themselves only a part of the total 2161, but still it's 400 colors missing, seemingly without even accounting for texture effects and whatnot.
Pantone prints "bridge decks", with the true spot colors printed right next to their CMYK best equivalent. If you've ever seen one, you might well conclude that almost none of the Pantone spot colors are representable in CMYK. It's not great!
(I only now noticed the “as of year 2000” next to the ‘1114’—while the number 2161 is from 2019. So presumably the number of un-representable colors grew in the meanwhile, and might be about 650 now if the proportion is the same.)
Also, personally I find that I'd like to have some kind of printed swatches just so I can figure out the color of my stuff at home and find the corresponding paint, sealant or whatever. I could just pirate Pantone and print some of it for like twenty bucks—however, if a third of it is outside CMYK, then I'm rather out of luck. Bit of a weird problem to have.
which uses a total of six colors and high precision filters such that there is a red that passes the left filter and a red that passes the right filter. The two reds look almost the same without the filters, but with the filters one becomes completely invisible. In situations where light is interacting with something other than your eye (filters, a prism) the physics become vastly more complex.
Speaking of 3D images lately I've been frustrated with wide gamut displays because I make images that are viewed through these glasses
Namely the red channel goes to the left eye and the green and blue go to the left eye. (0, 180, 0) in sRGB is converted by the application (Photoshop, Web Browser) to something like (16, 176, 15) before sending to a wide gamut model. Adding a little bit of red and blue to the wide gamut green makes it look less saturated and more like the sRGB green, but it's bad for anaglyph stereograms because the extra red light causes an unwanted ghost image to appear in the wrong channel.
It use to be and still is to a certain degree but Pantone has been trying to move digital and make consistent colors when printing 4 color. All the old books have ink formulas for spot colors which have limited uses these days. The new books ditch the formulas and give RGB, CMYK and html for each swatch.
Just guessing, but that seems to imply two possibilities. One containing colors that can't be implemented - no such pigments / ink / chemicals exist. And other one describing actual inks and their behavior - which sounds like what Pantone is doing.
Yes, Pantone describes inks using samples of actual products because it is in the business of selling ink.
Familiarity is the big design advantage of Pantone color. I look at the samples, pick a color, and that’s what I will get. Whether or not my monitor is calibrated or whether or not I am using a computer at all.
From a business perspective, if you’re logo is Reflex Blue, then any reputable print shop can print your leave-behinds and any decent sign shop can make your tradeshow display.
I think I'd start with: a list of how much of each range of frequencies of light are reflected, a list of light that's emitted, how matte/mirrored the surface is
The comments here seem to be mostly litigating whether Pantone ought to be allowed to license colour names. To me though, the scandalous thing about this is that a piece of software which you paid for can work fine one day can stop functioning the same way the next because of a change in the vendor's license agreements. Like imagine if you bought a song which uses samples and one day the backing track just disappears because the artist didn't renew the sample clearance.
This happens all the time in the entertainment industry.
For example: TV show X licenses pop song Y for its initial broadcast. The group that owns the syndication rights didn’t buy the right to use song Y, consequently they have to replace the music with generic Muzak in subsequent broadcasts.
You pay for Netflix, start watching show X, and when it gets to the big dramatic moment with sweeping music (that you remember from when the show originally aired), it’s replaced with elevator music.
The difference is, those changes don't affect existing copies, they affect new copies. If you have a VHS or DVD copy of the show before the license expired, then you have the original music. This is mangling old documents unless you pay a fee. Yet another example of modern copyright leading to the individuals having the least possible rights, in order to be nickled and dimed.
It would make more sense if existing documents could still retain their colors, but new documents couldn't be made with the Pantone colors in question. It'd still suck, but it'd be more respectful to the end users of the software.
I'm not sure. I stopped using Adobe CC products as a hobbyist because it costs way too damn much (I was only able to get three years of a student subscription from 2 different school email addresses).
Yes, but that doesn't stop it from sucking. Also, they can do it with streaming media, but they can't come to my house and replace my DVDs. Just because it's technically correct, doesn't mean that it's not a bullshit model which is anti-consumer and anti-creativity.
> You pay for Netflix, start watching show X, and when it gets to the big dramatic moment with sweeping music (that you remember from when the show originally aired), it’s replaced with elevator music.
WKRP in Cincinnati used a lot of rock/pop music that was replaced in syndication. I believe that's also why The Drew Carey Show isn't readily available these days.
Northern Exposure did this - another TV show that had a spectacularly well considered soundtrack, but licensing costs were onerous.
Though evidently the first season release did include original music, but had an exorbitant (retail) price - subsequent seasons they did the ol' elevator music swap-in.
Aside - it explains why, so I've been told, there's two similarly popular torrents out there, one high-quality DVD-rip with a bad score, and one low-quality VHS-rip with the original score.
I remember watching the episode "Faith" from Supernatural in TV with an amazing usage of "Don't fear the reaper" by Blue Öyster Cult (the cowbell one), and when trying to searching the episode in streaming platforms was replaced by a generic rock song... a total shame considering the plot of the episode it's about a literal Grim Reaper.
Agree. Updating old files with black specifically is egregious. Even replacing the color with a CMYK/RGB near equivalent would be far far less hostile than this approach. Oh you want to know what colors you used on that piece from 15 years ago? Pay up. It’s basically a shakedown and should be illegal.
It's a complex problem when you start to dig into it, mostly because so much software (including Photoshop) is delivered as a SaaS product and even more so as they become more and more cloud connected. Behaving more like a live-service that you're connected to rather than a discrete application on your device. You could say that your application should continue to have the licensed content, but their live-service couldn't continue to provide it through their servers.
I think these are just oversights in the contract in a way. I would hope we'd see less of these mishaps as time goes on and companies get better at writing long-term outcomes into their contracts. It would be a pain in the butt to write software that handles legacy licensing per user over a live service though.
We should plainly reject the adoption of Software Augmented with Additional Surveillance. If the purpose of some software doesn't involve communication, yet a specific piece of software arbitrarily requires Internet access (likely for the developer's own purposes of control), then don't use it. Period. In addition to saving yourself from this type of bait and switch, you'll be dodging some surveillance and other user-hostile anti-features enabled constant connectivity.
There are plenty of older releases of Photoshop available on torrent sites that will install locally, that should have long passed into public domain if copyright law were sane. If Adobe isn't even willing to sell you a version of Photoshop, and insists that you can now only rent it, that's yet another reason to not feel bad about piracy.
You're right, but that doesn't stop it from sucking. Like every defense of Adobe and Pantone here are technically correct and rational, but that doesn't stop this from being a stupid problem which is deeply unfair to the consumer.
Oh I agree wholeheartedly. And we will probably be bringing up the Adobe Pantone debacle in ten years when auto owners suddenly lose access to their heated seats because their licensing ran out, or somthing equally asinine. We seem to be very busy applying all these same mistakes but to real world products like coffee pod machines, cars and TVs, home security and such.
I own some shares in a company and took a look at what their valuation would be.
play sad trombone sound.
It did appear that companies with reoccurring revenue based on a monopoly are valued much higher than ones that produce single shot revenue. I think the solution would be to change corporate tax laws to even things out a bit. Like treat rents off things like Pantone as pure taxable profit.
I think people just need to change their way of thinking. Software these days isn’t really just a program, it’s a complex collection of business relationships and software is just the contract that allows them to operate together, and you’re one end of it. The software is just a supply chain that allows you to create new content, and it can be suddenly broken the same way a physical supply chain can be.
This is exactly what people have been worried about with the shift towards subscriptions instead of outright buying things. You didn't really pay to __own__ a specific piece of software anymore, you're paying for access to it. Because you don't actually own the thing it's subject to changing unexpectedly like this and there isn't really any recourse.
You don't buy Adobe software. You subscribe to the Adobe SaaS. This is the consequence of replacing products with subscriptions. If people don't like that then they should do something about it. Too late to vote with your wallet, the industry as a whole has moved to this.
Adam Smith, the guy who came up with capitalism, wrote about the evils of rent seeking. You need a regulatory approach.
I am not opposed to using regulation, but I can’t see what could be done with regulation that would lead to, say, non-subscription adobe products. Mandate that offline versions be available for purchase? There would also have to be some kind of price control mechanism or adobe would make it unaffordable. That seems very specific and messy, but I’m sure there are other ideas.
This is why I’m so happy to have the DRM-free version of Photoshop CS3 that they offered for a year or two after shutting down the CS3 product activation system. It might be old, but it runs fine on Windows 10 and I can depend on it staying the way it is.
Just wait till next year when Adobe will go free 2 play on their big names like Photoshop.
Wanna open files from other people? Just get the $15/month "Fun with Friends" DLC.
Oh need to save a file, better grab the "Sharing is Caring" Extra content pack, it's a steal at $20 a month.
But wait, don't forget about your magic lasso, it's part of the "western costumes and accessorizes pack". Not only do you get your magic lasso but you get a fancy cowboy hat for your desktop icon, and some chaps for your menu bar, just to show off your western side. It's a real bargain at $44.95 a month! We'll even include some real life six-shooter sounds to make it feel even more authentic.
Arguably, that model is already dying in favor of what Adobe already does: Maximum extraction from everyone who doesn't have price sensitivity and scraps for everyone else.
Magic The Gathering for is releasing a set with 60 random non-tournament legal cards for $1000, while thinning supply for their previously most popular product (Draft boosters) in favor of more "premium" products with eye-watering prices.
Overwatch 2 has moved on to charging $20+ for their skins and limits essentially all progression to a non-randomized Battlepass that requires you to turn the game into your second job to complete. In OW1, loot boxes were awarded regularly and contained enough currency that a few hours of play could get you any of the now $20 skins.
Mobile games figured out that the top 1% of consumers of entertainment media can pay for the bulk of it if you just ask for prices asinine enough. I guess we'll see if barring the other 99% from all optional content will lead to dives in player populations.
> “Rent seeking” is a term of art that means a specific thing
Right, and specifically in this context, it refers to the act of charging money from software in small continuing installments as opposed to charging money in one up-front installment (which might be called "buying").
In your earlier message you equated "rent-seeking" with "charging money for software". My point is that not all ways of charging money for software are rent-seeking.
I am in no way affiliated with them, but if you want a great alternative for the creative suite that HAS pantone support¹, definitely try out the Affinity counterparts: https://affinity.serif.com/
I decided to go cold turkey a few months ago, cancelled my Adobe CC subscription, uninstalled and went with Affinity Designer+Photo (they had a 50% off offer on).
To be honest, it’s hard! Every time I open the apps the muscle memory isn’t there, everything takes longer.
I didn’t used CC often enough any more to justify the subscription. But 20 years of knowledge and experience (at times I was using it every day) doesn’t translate as quickly to another app when you are only using it once a month.
The Affinity products are good, they just aren’t exactly the same as the Adobe equivalents.
I have Affinity Photo and suffer the same problems. I was never a Photoshop expert, nor a designer (I know its fallen out of fashion for web design), but I had been using it for 20 years.
I struggle and get frustrated with affinity photo (why are there multiple types of pixel layer??), even if it is good software, because to me - wrongly, of course - photoshop is de facto _how_ a photo editor should work. I'm sure I'll adjust with time. But I use photo editors less than ever, so it's very slow going.
But, I can't really complain for the price I paid, and no subscription necessary. A lot of respect for Affinity in that regard. It's a business model that is becoming increasingly rare.
This is true. They are a rival creative suite, and not a clone. For some things you will need to adjust your mental model, for which their in-house video tutorial series¹ are quite nice. For other things such as studio layout and keybindings you can either try to make them as close to Adobe as possible, or invest some time adapting to the new situation.
Certainly on the Mac, compatibility issues stop you from even installing older versions (installer is 32bit), then I think there were other issues with certain functions.
It's not even an Adobe fault likely. It's Pantone's market segmentation, AFAICT. "We don't want cheapskates who would ever mind paying mere $21/mo for access to Pantone™ colors", they could say. They want to deal with larger print shops / agencies, and better monetize their chokehold on the industry-accepted color-matching system.
This makes a niche for a more open, non-commercial color-matching system for print. Which has few incentives to happen: print color is hard, buy-in from paint producers is likely even harder.
For Web and other screen-only work, I suppose you don't need Pantone.
That niche is filled pretty nicely by Heidelberg. Their printers come with their own color correction and matching system. Plus they ship ICC profiles for accurate screen preview.
I was looking at Heidelberg since you suggested it. But, their product catalog is barely visible outside of spare parts and inks. The few things I could see, I cannot use them in a print shop, their equipment is much larger than the current print equipment which is nearing end of life.
> This makes a niche for a more open, non-commercial color-matching system for print.
Wikipedia tells me Pantone has been around since 1950, TL;DR if open non-commercial was going to happen, it would have happened already.
As you say, few incentives. Its harder than it looks, its not just a case of someone randomly declaring FOO 123=CMYK XYZ. Further, the whole supply chain is already well established with Pantone.
We have CIELAB for expressing colour in absolute form. This could always be used to express an intended colour.
However you are correct Pantone is entrenched as it is based on a simple set of formulas for easy mixing by print shops, this is also cemented into various systems that take premixed pantones directly (eg HP Indigo). Pantone also extends into neon and metallics where LAB of course doesn’t exist.
Declaring arbitrary CMYK or RGB values without including a corresponding colour profile will produce inaccurate results across different devices/output methods due to variation (hence why we have colour profiles.)
This change will just likely lead to more colours being specified as arbitrary rgb and cmyk values with accuracy be damned, which is a trend of new style guides for the last few years (also due the rise of trademarking colours).
I know of at least one color lab that spent years and had multiple really smart people trying to come up with a closed-form solution for the color (both diffuse and specular) given a {ink, illuminant, substrate} combination and last I heard never succeeded. Without that, you are limited to making giant tables, which is what PMS does and it's only useful if everyone is using the same tables.
I think part of the reason is that beyond a certain scope there is limited commercial desire for such levels of exactness.
While companies will talk the talk about always needing their brand colour represented perfectly. I've found very few walk the talk. Presenting printing quotations with PMS versus standard CMYK, they often compromise. Presenting premiums or other production which isn't print-based, suddenly they're happy to compromise rather than organise a custom dip.
So while we have CIE as our solid reference, for cosmetic representations, we probably don't need more beyond than that commercially for the bulk of clients.
Why is everybody insisting that the lookup table isn't 1:1? Can't you do a reverse mapping of "closest Pantone color to this CMYK"? There are only thousands of Pantone colors and as many CMYKs as you have bit resolution. So if you know your file previously used Pantone colors, you can have it in a "preview" mode with CMYK and then a "production" mode where you convert it back.
I am not a lawyer, but I don't see how the process of reverse-engineering a map is copyrightable. Sure, I might not sell a tool to convert to/from Pantone colors in Illustrator files as Adobe (who might want continuous business and/or a bite at the revenue apple), but somebody else can certainly fill this space. The only problem is that the names of the colors themselves are probably trademarked, but that's not a copyright problem, and the utilization of another's trademark to identify a good seems within typical fair use.
Because Pantone spots don’t just represent the digital representation of CMYK or RGB. They’re a lot more complex because they represent how the color should look at the end.
There’s a lot here that isn’t just a simple 1:1 lookup
That's... exactly the argument that I'm responding to in my original comment. My argument is there are billions of CMYKs to encode thousands of Pantones with. Just do the reverse mapping if you know it's supposed to be a Pantone color.
In a way, this isn't new, people have been using toxic colors for quite a while. The innovation here is really that Pantone managed to get toxic color without using heavy metals or any other chemical ingredient.
Another proof that too much money destroys everything at some point, much as you need water but too much water will kill you.
In Germany, Deutsche Telekom has long tried to own the letter U+0054 Latin Capital Letter T and the color magenta. Use any of those and you risk being sued.
This is what happens when you rent your software instead of buying it. Don't support rental software. If you want your software to keep working for when you need to use it again far in the future, don't rent it.
Another clear proof that you are easily fucked when you use proprietary softwares!
The worse for users is to remember that they paid to be screwed like this.
Doubly so when it's a subscription model w/ forced updates. At least in the old days, when you paid to "own" a copy, you could keep it running as long as all of its dependencies worked.
Yes, Pantone and Photoshop are both proprietary. My point is that if people instead used a FOSS image editing program, they'd never end up in the situation where some feature of it they were previously using gets unilaterally taken away.
With open source, you would not be able to get it in the first place, period. PANTONE has intellectual property here and no crowdsourced / opensource alternative exists if you want to do what PANTONE provides for you. Here, you have the option to pay to get it.
> With open source, you would not be able to get it in the first place, period.
Which would indeed have avoided this problem. This bait-and-switch is worse than just never having been able to use Pantone colors at all would have been, because now they're holding your existing .psd files hostage.
Let's get specific here: what does "replaced with black" mean? Is the swatch itself remapped to the "black" swatch, or is my Pantone color name the same, and only the values change? If the swatches are still named the same thing, at least I can recreate the colors, but if that information is lost, we've got chaos on our hands.
Essentially, the biggest issue is with spot color channels in Photoshop files. If you don't have a license for the spot color used in the file, it goes black, with no clues other than the name left behind. If you can look it up somewhere, you'll be OK, but it's a real pain.
If you are still using Adobe software, you have demonstrated a willingness to bend over backwards and pay subscriptions. Is it any wonder Pantone wants to get in on the action of fleecing sheep?
Sounds like Adobe decided they could save some $$$ and make a bigger profit not renewing the Pantone license, and instead force people to pay extra, and cream a % off the top of those monthly fees.
Taking a different side on that, Adobe decided that the small number of professional users who really need Pantone colours shouldn't be subsidised by those who do not.
If this decision was driven by concern about the median customer paying more than their fair share, there would be a corresponding reduction in price. Has there been?
> If this decision was driven by concern about the median customer paying more than their fair share, there would be a corresponding reduction in price
That's not a logically sound. Adobe may have decided they can only continue to support the current price-point by reducing costs, for example.
Classic shrinkflation. Normally Adobe would raise prices due to inflation, but they decided that cutting costly features and keeping the price the same is received better by the market.
The price of Adobe Creative Suite isn’t based on cost, it’s an attempt to reflect the value of the product.
For me, an amateur with very basic image editing needs, it would be silly to pay $250+/year for using Photoshop. So instead, I use Acorn, which is $40. One-time fee.
And if you want a FOSS alternative, there’s always Gimp and/or Krita. No payment required at all.
It’s not as if people are forced to buy Adobe. I’d say the market works just fine here.
The future promised by the Windows XP era was so optimistic. Multimedia editing was truly becoming mainstream and democratized, and the future for independently created media was bright. "If this is what iMovie and Windows Movie Maker can do, what does the future hold?"
Now we're talking about making colours DLC for Photoshop.
I’d say it’s pretty amazing. You can shoot very credible video and pics on a phone. And basically pro-level stuff using gear that’s incredibly cheap by historical standards. Lots of good inexpensive editors out there. You can even use Gimp and Blender which are IMO a bit rough relative to commercial options but I have colleagues who create amazing work with them.
But there are Pantone colors in the spec, and by "the spec" I mean "every spec." The logo for the company you work for is probably defined as a specific Pantone spot. And if I have to pay separately for Pantone in Photoshop, there's no reason for me not to move to another tool other than if Pantone intentionally refused to sell spot support to me on another piece of software.
Which leads me to think that they (Adobe, not Pantone) endlessly tested and researched the maximum they could add to the price if they blamed it on Pantone (who are happy to take the blame because they're so entrenched that it won't affect their business in the slightest.) They did it, and Pantone and Adobe are going to split the proceeds. Or, rather, you're going to "subscribe to a Pantone license" and "subscribe to a Adobe plugin for Pantone management" as a pretense.
PANTONE has been outdated in Adobe tools since 2006. If you're serious about PANTONE, I think it's unlikely you actively use Adobe's outdated set honestly. The worst thing about PANTONE is that it is both not entirely forwards or backwards compatible. You generally want to be on newer versions of PANTONE because of the greater amount of clarity in material application.
Good opportunity for someone to make a pantone -> non pantone converter. Pop in your file, convert all the Pantone colors to similar free colors. Profit.
The correct RGB values heavily depend on your printing process. And your ICC profile. So conversion is not trivial. You could license it, though, because that's precisely what Pantone has been selling for 20 years.
I don't think Pantone will give you a license to their database if you make a product to compete with them. If they do, you can probably expect a lawsuit anyway.
I wonder if that is considered a copyright violation. The customer is giving you X and you are giving back Y. But Y is not copyright. It could be considered a derivative work, but what if you change Y, so it's a couple of degrees off on the HSV scale?
In a similar vein, phonebooks. The answer... is complicated. There is a thing called "database rights", which as you might guess is a mess. The US argues that there is no right as you've simply compiled information (see Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., and that's why I used phonebooks as an analogy) while Europe (not just EU, even UK and Russia) do recognize database rights.
Even skipping about it, Pantone named them, which could give them copyright protection in the US (and other countries without specific database rights).
PANTONE does not work that way. A converter like that would only allow you to see similar colors on your screen but would not guarantee the likeness of the color on different devices / print. So such a conversion would be lossy.
Are pantone colors just specific rgb(a) values, or is there some other stuff that makes them special, for printing or something? This has shades of the "Metallica copywriters G and F chords" thing, but I'm assuming there must be more to it?
Pantone is a standardised set of printing colours outside of CMYK, often used to print richer or more specific (accurate) colours.
A designer picks a colour on a printed—quite expensive—colour chart instead of their monitor. Because it’s an end-to-end standard you get a guaranteed exact colour match in the printed result.
It’s interesting that they mangle the file. I can see how pantone might be able to control licensing the interpreting and display of the colors, but surely they can’t legally prevent the storage of a simple numeric code.
To put it into perspective, there are several good reasons why one wouldn’t.
First and foremost, I’m not going to make the same mistake again, which is spending time and brain cells on learning to use a thing that one day, someone is going to take away from me on a whim.
Not to speak of what’s going to happen to all my files when that day comes.
It may be ok for low-entry-barrier things, such as an email client.
But there’s absolutely no way I’m going to lock myself into a non-free creative tool ever again.
Exactly that lookup table is the entirety of Pantone's business. They've got a list of colors (which are just indices into this table) mapping these color names to a specific CMYK combination as well as chemical formulas for exactly that color in printing, plastic, in all kinds of materials.
That ensures that any two people naming the same pantone color will always know exactly which color is meant.
And this lookup table is what's copyrighted under database rights.
You need multiple LUT for different profiles black 100% with Fogra39 will come out differently than black 100% on a desktop inkjet.
And this collection of look up tables to make color reproduction more predictable, that's precisely what Pantone licenses... So that's probably why Adobe wasn't allowed to add it for free.
> It doesn't have to be accurate. Anything close is better than black.
No. Because that breaks design intent.
If the client and designer agree on "Pantone XYZ", then you can't just go replacing that with "something that looks vaguely like Pantone XYZ".
That would be a breach of the agreement between client and designer. It would also, as explained further up this thread, "its not that easy". "Pantone XYZ" is not "just another name for C:1,M:2,Y:3,K:4", its all about ensuring consistent reproduction of that colour across all desired substrates.
How about letting the user choose? Because if Adobe stopped acting like they know better they could solve this with one click:
> You are using Pantone colors, but you don't have a license for them.
> [X] Replace with a similar CMYK value, obtained from printing the color in Bob's old home printer.
> [ ] Purchase rights to the Pantone library.
Now the x% of designers who really need Pantone colors can pay for them and the remaining (100-x)% users can use their files in peace. This is similar to what Inkscape does when converting a PDF with unknown fonts, and it's (IMO) a much better solution.
The point is not to get it almost right, the point is to not maim the file by turning everything black so you can't see anything and have to start from zero. Obviously the file is damaged either way, but we can do a hell of a lot better than all color data eliminated altogether.
Shakespeare had no lawyers, and that's kinda why we ended up with this system. Shakespeare's work was regularly published without him getting a penny in royalties. He himself never got anything for his plays except what his theater paid him.
The official Folio edition was published after he was dead. The quarto editions made during his lifetime are riddled with errors because they were made from people's memories of his plays, not the manuscripts. The manuscripts were kept carefully guarded, and the actors given only "sides" containing their own lines to prevent them from running off and selling them.
Actually, Shakespeare did have lawyers; much of what we know about him comes from legal documents. (Including lawsuits. He was kind of a litigious bugger.) But he didn't have lawyers to protect his works because there wasn't any such thing. And it was precisely that which caused the copyright system to be created.
And yet despite the complete lack of copyright protections, he was able to make quite a comfortable living and died with a sizable estate, and his work survives to this day.
Most of it. Several Shakespeare plays are lost. And many more playwrights, without wealthy friends, are completely lost. It would be fascinating to have Thomas Kyd's version of Hamlet (likely Shakespeare's immediate source), or for that matter Kyd's precursor to The Spanish Tragedy. Kyd was, at the time, more popular than Shakespeare.
The Licensing of the Press Act 1662, entitled "An Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Books and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses",[0] gave the Stationers' Company a monopoly on printing - only people licensed by the Company could operate printing presses, and similarly nobody was allowed to sell books unless licensed. The Company also had the power, under its royal charter, to make regulations about printing, effectively creating a private system of copyright controlled by the Company.
The Licensing of the Press Act 1662 had to be continually renewed, but eventually it lapsed in 1692. Publishers lobbied hard for the act to be reinstated but all attempts failed to pass through the House of Commons.
It wasn't until 1710 that authors gained a time-limited exclusive statutory right to control the printing of their books (and only books), with what would be the first "modern" public copyright law in the Copyright Act 1710 (also known as the Statute of Anne), and naturally this right was exploited by publishers (just as it is today) who refused to publish without acquiring the rights along with the manuscript.
> In 1557, the desires of the booksellers and the desires of the crown coincided. The crown perceived the need to gain greater control over “the dangerous possibilities of the printed word” and so granted a royal charter to the Stationers’ Company that limited most printing to only members of the company. This charter also empowered the company to search out and destroy “unlawful” books, which gave the guild the public enforcement mechanism for its private law. If a nonmember was printing a work that had been registered with the company by a member, the nonmember could now be stopped. It also meant that if a work which was disagreeable to the crown was being published, it too could be stopped. This arrangement provided the crown with added policemen to enforce its goal to control printed works. Censorship was born.
But like, once I found that, I immediately realized that we can just look at Wikipedia.
> The origin of copyright law in most European countries lies in efforts by the church and governments to regulate and control the output of printers.[9] Before the invention of the printing press, a writing, once created, could only be physically multiplied by the highly laborious and error-prone process of manual copying by scribes. An elaborate system of censorship and control over scribes did not exist, as scribes were scattered and worked on single manuscripts.[10] Printing allowed for multiple exact copies of a work, leading to a more rapid and widespread circulation of ideas and information (see print culture).[9] In 1559 the Index Expurgatorius, or List of Prohibited Books, was issued for the first time.[10]
Which cites:
[9]: MacQueen, Hector L; Charlotte Waelde; Graeme T Laurie (2007). Contemporary Intellectual Property: Law and Policy. Oxford University Press. p. 34. ISBN 978-0-19-926339-4.
There is another, much more detailed paragraph, which starts a bit later with:
> As the "menace" of printing spread, governments established centralized control mechanisms,[16] and in 1557 the English Crown thought to stem the flow of seditious and heretical books by chartering the Stationers' Company. The right to print was limited to the members of that guild, and thirty years later the Star Chamber was chartered to curtail the "greate enormities and abuses" of "dyvers contentyous and disorderlye persons professinge the arte or mystere of pryntinge or selling of books." The right to print was restricted to two universities and to the 21 existing printers in the city of London, which had 53 printing presses. The French crown also repressed printing, and printer Etienne Dolet was burned at the stake in 1546.
Citing a different page of the same source as 10:
[16]: de Sola Pool, Ithiel (1983). Technologies of freedom. Harvard University Press. p. 15. ISBN 978-0-674-87233-2.
Very helpful. So it's reasonable to concede that in Europe, and only in Europe, the origin of copyright was in censorship and the protection of profits for publishers.
However, the US is an entirely different story. Turning the page on your preferred source:
American legislators and courts rejected these three abuses which publishing had suffered in their country of origin: licensing of the press, special taxes on the press, and prosecution for criminal libel.
The unconstitutionality of licensing, which the American courts referred to as "previous" or "prior restraint," was decided as early as
1825. The tradition against special taxes on the press, which British protestors such as Richard Cobden called "taxes on knowledge," was reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in 1936 And the prohibition against criminal libel suits became an American tradition in the 1735 trial of Peter Zenger, accused of libeling the governor of New York.
The colonial jury, disregarding the judge's instructions on the law, acquitted Zenger and thus made the law. Since 1964, libel suits brought by public officials or public figures against their critics, even when brought in their own capacity and not by the state, have been greatly restricted by the courts.
The colonists' rejection of the various British attempts to impose government authority over the press were incorporated into the American Constitution by the First Amendment. This amendment creates a domain- of speech, religion, and press in which the activities of private citizens shall be unregulated by government. "Con-gress," it says, "shall make no law ... abridging freedom of speech or of the press."
But the First Amendment is just one of three clauses in the Constitution that deal specifically with communications. Another is the copyright provision in Article 1, Section 8: "Congress shall have the power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." In Britain the practice of copyright, though not the word, began at the founding of the Stationers' Company when, for enforcement, the company was given the right to search for and seize anything printed contrary to statute or proclamation. Eight years later the company, under this power, created a system of copyright for its members. In 1709 the first copyright act for authors was passed by Parliament. The new notion of intellectual property represented by copyright was rooted in the technology of print. The printing press was a bottleneck where copies could be examined and controlled. In the passage from the author's pen to the reader's hand, the press was the logical place to apply controls, be it to censor sacrilege or sedition or to protect the author's intellectual property.
For modes of reproduction where such an easy locus of control as the printing press did not exist, the concept of copyright was not ap-plied. It was not applied to conversation, or to speeches, or to the singing of songs whether in private or in public. Copyright was a specific adaption to a specific technology. The common law recognized this fact. The landmark case in the United States denied copyright protection to piano rolls because they were not "writings" in a tangible form readable by a human being.
This concept of copyright excluded from protection many new technologies of communi-cation. But the motion picture industry, the recording industry, and more recently the broadcasting industry have all persuaded Congress to give them the protection that the courts proved unwilling to give.
The third provision in the Constitution dealing with communications gives Congress the power "To establish Post Offices and post Roads. 23 This provision put the federal government into the common carrier business. Only one of today's carrier systems then ex-isted, the mails. A post office had been permanently established in Britain in 1656 and in the colonies in 1711.
Before that, the crown had farmed out grants and patents to private entrepreneurs to carry government correspondence. To make these franchises attractive, the franchisees were also allowed to carry letters for the general public for a fee, and others were forbidden to compete with the chosen carriers in doing so. This scheme for providing government with cheap communication was the origin of the postal monopoly. When governments started carrying the mails themselves, the monopoly principle was further reinforced.
After American independence, the fiscal tradition of the post as a source of revenue was retained, and so was the practice of monop-oly. In the 1820s the balance of public policy shifted from one of subordinating the post office to the treasury department as a producer of revenue, to promoting it to a full-fledged department of government, consecrated above all to extending the benefits of development to remote parts of the country at a rapid pace. Still another important as well as expensive social goal pursued through the post office in the nineteenth century was the diffusion of knowledge.
Newspapers, and later books and magazines, were given large subsidies in mail rates.
The constitutional injunctions to the federal government with regard to communications were thus in appearance somewhat contra-dictory, though in fact their goals were quite consistent. In one clause the government was told to keep its legislative hands off of speech and press, while in two others it was told to promote the conveyance of knowledge by means of copyright and postal service. But both the injunctions to restraint and the injunction to governmental activism had the common goal of facilitating autonomous communication by private individuals.
"Modern copyright law has been influenced by an array of older legal rights that have been recognized throughout history, including the moral rights of the author who created a work, the economic rights of a benefactor who paid to have a copy made, the property rights of the individual owner of a copy, and a sovereign's right to censor and to regulate the printing industry. The origins of some of these rights can be traced back to ancient Greek culture, ancient Jewish law, and ancient Roman law. In Greek society, during the sixth century B.C.E., there emerged the notion of the individual self, including personal ideals, ambition, and creativity. The individual self is important in copyright because it distinguishes the creativity produced by an individual from the rest of society.[citation needed] In ancient Jewish Talmudic law there can be found recognition of the moral rights of the author and the economic or property rights of an author."
Later, when Oracle acquires Shakespeare, you'd be billed not by how many words you use, but how many people hear or read your words. If they mishear your words, you're double billed because otherwise they're getting words for free.
I agree completely. But don't blame the lawyers -- that's like blaming guns for the war in Ukraine. Blame the companies that lobby for the laws and treaties that set these kinds of IP protection, and then use those laws to come after people who actually try to create something.
Sir, lawyers identify the possibly loopholes to lobby into, write the laws that are lobbied, and work the loopholes that exist.
They are 100% culpable at every step. They do it for money, and the broad culture is one of scoffing at ethics or honesty, which are seen as weaknesses.
Guns aren't conscious. Lawyers are (at least on some level).
You could probably say the same thing about computer programmers. They write algorithms with questionable outcomes. There is a culture that generally scoffs at ethical questions (at least in some segments).
But i dont think you will see that here, because we are programmers and lawyers are the other.
There are lawyers on both sides, fighting each other. That's how the system works. The winner is largely determined by the laws. The laws are set by legislators, and those legislators are heavily influenced by corporations.
The lawyers aren't the ones deciding what the laws are.
> The lawyers aren't the ones deciding what the laws are.
Lol. As you say, the wealthy decide the laws, and the lawyers write them. The vast majority of lawyers work for whoever pays them the most.
In today's world, in today's system, that's generally whoever can fuck over the most people, or extract the most from nature while externalizing the cost, and get away with it. Almost by definition, the wealthiest are the literal worst. Public defenders get paid beans, and are overworked with no respect, while fossil fuel and banker's lawyers live in mansions with a fraction of the effort.
Damn near every aspect of our society and the world we live in has been tainted by this.
Environmental groups don't have the funds that Exxon do, and the response to oil spills and climate change reflects this. Look at Donziger. Look at Deepwater Horizon.
Peace groups don't have the funds Raytheon do, and the response to people like Assange and Snowden reflects that.
Poor people and groups who advocate for them don't have the funds available that the .01% do. Our tax code and social supports reflect this fact in ten thousand ways, each grotesque.
And in all of this, the lawyers are culpable. They work to attack the peaceniks, the whistleblowers, the tax reformists, the journalists seeking accountability. They sue for libel, they make shit up and make it stick, they find the obscure laws and loopholes, they stack the court, stack the deck, all for a tiny portion of the wealth 'saved' for the yacht class.
Lawyers enable a rather unimaginable amount of evil by doing these things. I don't understand how the fact they're told to do this by the evil corporations paying them obscene amounts to enable their evil acts absolves them of anything - can you explain it to me?
Let's imagine a counterfactual. Absent lawyers, who helps legislators write the laws? Who helps a software developer write a contract, and how does the developer get their money if the other side decides they don't want to pay?
If we're chucking out lawyers, are we also getting rid of judges? Juries?
We have a legal system developed over hundreds of years. It involves people on both sides advocating for their clients. The clients are in total control. The clients are the ones who hire, pay, and fire the lawyers. The clients are the ones who hire lobbyists and who pay campaign contributions to influence the laws.
The clients are the the ones who aim and shoot; the lawyers are the guns. How area the lawyers the problem rather than the clients?
> The vast majority of lawyers work for whoever pays them the most.
Unlike the rest of us?
Seems like the real issue you have is capitalism not lawyers. Capitalism allows rich people to hire skilled workers to do their bidding. I don't see what lawyers as a class of people, have to do with that. Some work for ethically questionable rich people, some dont. How does that set them apart from say accountants, corporate strategists, etc?
I mean you're here saying that if lawyers are generally bad as a class then corporate strategists and corporate tax accountants would be too.
... As if that disproves the argument.
... Bruh.
Capitalism is killing the planet, and lawyers, as a class, are helping them do it. Yes, some lawyers are fighting, but they're paid less. Because, again, of this particular form of crony unaccountable capitalism. This isn't all that controversial or complex. You seem caught in a weird loop somehow though, where if capitalism and all those jobs are bad, then your worldview is invalidated and that's just not possible.
I mean in the sense that lawyers are a type of human, and some humans are evil, sure.
What would happen if all the food-prep workers disappeared in a blink - probably the world would recover, because its pretty hard to dig for oil while dying of starvation.
What would happen if all the lawyers disappeared? Probably things would get worse. Big bizz only hires lawyers to deal with opposing lawyers. If there were no lawyers they wouldn't have to bother hiring any. For that matter they wouldn't have to comply with any environmental regulation, even the insufficient ones. They wouldn't have to deal with critics, since they can just shoot them (what are you going to do if you don't like them arbitrarily murdering people? Call a lawyer? Oh wait there are none).
This isn't a hypothetical. There really are failed states in the world that effectively do not have lawyers (As we know them). You can go there, and see how the environment is treated. I assure you, you won't like it.
Blaming lawyers for the world's problems is like blaming the writer of the newspaper you read about the problems in for the problems.
I'm getting the impression that either you don't have any experience with lawyers, or your parents are lawyers and you think their way of life is normal.
Lawyers lie for a living, and that inevitably fucks them up mentally. Over decades, over centuries of colonialist, capitalist apologetics, that has metastasized into an extremely sick culture.
If you lie for a living too, you might see no issue with that. But it is an issue, whatever your opinion and whatever circumstances led you to form it.
> Lawyers lie for a living, and that inevitably fucks them up mentally.
Depending on circumstances, either literally a crime or something that might get them in trouble with their ethics board. Lawyers often present circumstances in a biased way in favour of their clients. But they get in trouble if they tell an out and out lie.
You are imagining lawyers as monsters you can project all of the worlds sins on. It makes life simple so you dont have to think deeply about the world, but it doesn't match reality.
> Pantone did not invent colors... physics did. Who the fuck allowed this company to register colors under copy rights?
The point is communication, usability, and reproduction.
Communication because "Pantone 123" is easier to convey throughout the chain than "C:11,Y:22,M:33,K:44".
Usability because Pantone swatches are easier to use in a design environment, and also easier to choose the swatch number in Adobe than to mess around choosing "C:11,Y:22,M:33,K:44". You can also give your client a Pantone swatch book and let them loose without them having to know about CMYK, substrates etc. etc.
Reproduction because you can ensure you consistently achieve the same output irrespective of substrate (uncoated,coated,glossy, paper, fabric yada yada yada ...). It also gives printers a well defined reference for ink mixing, quality checks etc.
TL;DR: It makes everyone's life easier, clients, designers, printers etc.
Pantone, a division of X-Rite, is owned by Danaher. Fluke is also owned by Danaher. I have no particular point, other than I found it interesting that the two brands of shared parentage collided spontaneously in conversation.
Also HP had big test equipment business, then the HP went with computers and the measurement stuff was spun into Agilent.
Then the electronic measurement stuff was spun into Keysight and the Agilent was left with every other instrument stuff. So the soul of HP changed name twice
The HP also spun into HPE for servers/switches/storage and other datacenter stuff.
All to shed business units that are "just steadily making money" from ones that see bigger growth.
Part of the utility of Pantone is not just the color spec but the physical samples they produce that are the actual specifications and standards. They make color swatches and cards so that you can see for sure what everyone else will (try) to produce when you say "make this accent piece Pantone 13459 with a matte finish and this bit over here Pantone 9329 with a glossy finish." The utility isn't 100% just in the standard but also in producing those physical instantiations so designers and artists can KNOW what color they're actually specifying and can see it in different lights not just on a screen that might not fully replicate the color.
Making all those samples is tougher to do with an open standard, you'd need some certification body/process for a company to make for people to use to satisfy a similar niche as Pantone.
Pantone is an ink the public domain standard would be cmyk.
If you get five printers and ask them all to print C:11,Y:22,M:33,K:44 you get five different colours as each will have to mix their cmyk inks to get that colour.
Pantone is a spot colour that means you can buy a pot of ink thats Pantone 123 there is no mixing so the colour is always the same. If you want to print on glossy paper thats going to change the look of the colour so Pantone also do inks for each surface you want to print on, they also do dyes for plastics and clothes etc.
Edit: The difference between the five printers would be insignificant but if you are a designer or want your logo to look exactly the same on stand ups, pamphlet, business cards etc you would use a spot colour.
Because somebody hasn't done all the work. Why would they?
As an individual crafter/designer I could see myself developing specifications for a small number of colors I use in a project. Doing 1000s of colors would be a huge project that would need some way to pay for it.
pantone have a colour mixing system based on 6 primaries called hexachrome, they then publish a book of formulas using those colours - it’s an easy way for printers to mix up the colours. This represents the majority of “pantone” colours.
Anyone is still able to mix and use a colour through other means, but no one can put out a book with pantone’s same formulas.
The real problems however arise with trademarked colours (think tiffany’s blue, whiskas purple, kinder orange, etc.) That’s where you literally can’t use a colour in a particular copyright category.
"The real problems however arise with trademarked colours (think tiffany’s blue, whiskas purple, kinder orange, etc.) "
Is it a problem, though? The only limitation is that you can't use these colors to misrepresent a product a product in a commercial setting. You can't sell an item wrapped in Tiffany's Blue.
" That’s where you literally can’t use a colour in a particular copyright category. "
No, these colors are not protected under copyright, only trademarks. The limits on using them only apply to particular context of trade. You can use trademarks freely as long as they're not misrepresenting the trade item. You can paint with them. They can appear in your photographs.
Sorry, yes I mistyped "copyright" for trademark, however the earlier reference to trademarks should have clued to the correct word.
However contrary to your assumption; trademark protection is proactive or the owner risks losing their trademark to general use. This requires that even similar usage in other branding/trademarks is opposed.
For the Tiffany & Cp example, it means any kind of medium blue can't be used in their registered trademark categories regardless if it obvious that it's not Tiffany & Co. The benchmark for litigation is not misrepresentation.
This is a problem as there is currently a land grab for colours, and since each must be protected broadly, and each trademark owner files the broadest number of categories possible this becomes a minefield.
Sure, and I think we probably agree that some reform is needed around trademarking colors. So I'll correct myself as well and agree that it is a problem -- though somewhat limited in scope.
My point was only that it isn't a broad limitation such as Copyright creates that spills over into say, letting a camera take pictures with a shade of blue or using blue in a piece of software. I believe the scope of the trademark's application is fairly narrow, so it's not something most people in other fields need to worry about.
I thought it was well established that recipes (incl - formulas, compounds, and prescriptions) can't be covered with copyright - so I'm assuming this only applies specifically to the pantone names, as listed in a compendium with other copyright material?
Pantone did invent their names for colours. You can use the colours, but not their names. These files are using their names is the issue. If the file used their own names or raw CMYK values it’s be fine.
Does that matter if the thing being designed is gonna printed by a cmyk printer or displayed on a screen? And more: does it matter if the color is 1/3 of a lumen off from whatever was shown on a screen that was possibly not even properly calibrated?
If you pick up a pantone book and flip through it, they put their colors opposite CMYK equivalents. Sometimes they barely resemble each other. CMYK is optimally expressive, not maximally expressive. To make all the pantone colors requires a wall full of sloppy cans of paint to be mixed through a book of arcane formulas. To make a CMYK color, you need four cans of paint and four percentage values.
edit: anybody who thinks the gamut of CMYK is anything like the gamut of Pantone, try printing out something purple on your printer. I worked prepress, and trying to get a good CMYK purple is my idea of hell.
Generally no, it doesn't matter if you're just displaying on (mostly uncalibrated) screens, or printing in CMYK on normal paper stock. It gets more interesting if you're producing things like brochures, in which you care about the texture and technique used to apply particular areas as well as the colour itself. Thing about things like the glossy lettering on a brochure which can't be represented as a set of four colours.
And the fact is that a lot of designers can get incredibly anal about tiny details of color/texture/etc. I remember back in undergrad when I was doing some press work, there was one poster that the designers had specified two different (Pantone) shades of dark neutral ink and I doubt anyone looking at the poster saw anything other than "black" for both of them.
And before any developers throw shade on this sort of obsessiveness, remember stones and glass houses.
I picked up a love of design obsession from the years I spent working as a developer in design agencies. A lot of it is very much focused on how a thing feels to whoever receives it, even they don't consciously notice that happening. Stuff like the paper stock or binding is only ever going to excite a professional designer, but even people with no education on this at all can tell the difference between a glossy brochure with thick textured pages and a cheap flyer printed for as little money as possible. Some companies even target the latter because they don't want to give the impression of being a luxury retailer.
If you're printing CMYK you wouldn't really use a Pantone color anyway. The value of Pantone is that you can get a specific color with just one printing pass. If what you're printing only has black, and forest green, then instead of doing a cyan pass, a magenta pass, a yellow pass, and a black pass, you can do a black pass and a Pantone 17-0230 TCX pass.
>- in some places masks were mandatory unless you were vaccinated, which meant that literally you couldn't breathe (well) unless you paid big pharma for the right.
Could you expand on this, especially the "literally you couldn't breathe", part.
And the rest, too, could do with some development.
It's a lot easier for designers to discern the Pantone name "Mahogany" than its RGB value (205,74,74).
The rub here is that X-Rite (like a Registrar) owns the rights to the Pantone names. Now they want to collect a fee for it's Pantone names (similarly to how Registrars collects fee for Domain Names)
Edit: Also, converting from Pantone to regular RGB/CMYK is a lot more lossy than one would think. If I reference a Pantone product, that pretty much covers all properties of the printed surface, including things like reflectivity angles, fluorescence and phosphorescence. A cheap xRite will already measure reflectivity in 13 wavelength bands. And then it'll average those 13 characteristics into 3 RGB numbers. Professional color measurement tools can have hundreds of properties per ink type, thereby making reduction to 3 values even more lossy.
If I give you RGB, that merely specifies the color at direct reflection under normal light. If I give you a Pantone ID, you also now how it'll look from the side or under UV light. RGB specifies an averaged wavelength mixture, Pantone specifies a chemical ink mixture.
Edit2: You know these car paints that have fresnel reflections, meaning they appear to have a different color of you look at them from a different angle? That's an excellent example of a case where you need to specify a specific ink type like Pantone, because the RGB value changes based on the viewing angle.