There’s a piece of news floating around the open IP and allied communities at the moment which appears to have caused some consternation. It comes from Adobe, who have announced that due to an end of their licensing deal with Pantone LLC, PSD images loaded into Photoshop will have pixels containing unlicensed Pantone colours replaced with black. What, Pantone own colours now, are we expected to pay a royalty every time we take a picture of a blue sky? It’s natural to react with suspicion when hearing a piece of news like this, but for once we think this might not be the unreasonable intellectual property land grab it may first appear. To illustrate this, it’s necessary to explain what Pantone does, and what they don’t do.
Heinz use Pantone to ensure their Viridian Green baked bean branding colour is consistent. Use it on a can of beans and Heinz will probably sue you, not Pantone.
For a company that bases its whole product line on colours, it might seem odd to say that Pantone do not own or sell colours. Instead their product is in effect a colour matching service, a library of defined and named colours which can be matched by designers, printers, ink manufacturers, paint companies, and anyone else who produces a coloured product. The bit they own is the name and index number for a colour in their library, not the colour itself. If a designer creates a logo for a cu ..
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