This file has Pantone colors that have been removed and replaced with black

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.

It would be an appropriate undertaking for something like NIST, I would suspect.

Germany also has HKS [1], which is irrelevant on a global scale but fairly popular for domestic printed media.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HKS_(colour_system)

How long is not updating photoshop an option? Will the DRM stop supporting old versions eventually? (like it already has with some of the CS versions)

People are also having issues with face detection libraries in the latest perpetually-licensed version of Lightroom. So that's not always true.

The problem emanates from the supply end.

They all want their recurring revenue because some other corporation is doing it. There is no more thought put into it than that.

> “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 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.

Bit of a cheeky response but you could always encode the BRDF with numbers.

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.

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.

I think you're confused about the conversation that's being had.

Nobody is suggesting (reduction in production costs) → (reduction in median consumer price)

We are only suggesting (reduction in production costs as a way to reduce median consumer price) → (reduction in median consumer price)

If there was no reduction in median consumer price, then, contrary to GGP's position, it is fair to conclude that it's not part of Adobe's intent.

Is not like you were not able to pirate photoshop 20y ago, or just now.

I immediately remember encrypted, region-locked DVDs and the oppressed but often open-source tools to counteract it, like DeCSS. Early 2000s were fun!

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.

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.

[0] https://www.british-history.ac.uk/statutes-realm/vol5/pp428-...

FWIW, the most obvious Google search found this within a few seconds:

https://www.techdirt.com/2010/08/11/the-cycle-of-copyright-o...

Which references this:

http://web.archive.org/web/20110616151937/http://www.telerea...

As its source for this:

https://open-spaces.com/articles/the-purpose-of-copyright/

Where we find an explanation:

> 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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright

> 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.

https://www.google.com/books?id=_Iwcn4pT0OoC&dq=contemporary...

[10]: de Sola Pool, Ithiel (1983). Technologies of freedom. Harvard University Press. p. 14. ISBN 978-0-674-87233-2.

https://books.google.com/books?id=BzLXGUxV4CkC&q=Areopagitic...

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.

https://archive.org/details/technologiesoffr00ithi/page/15

Take every rant with lots of salt (unless it is labeled as a rant).

(Edit: Jest removed in favor of discussion)

> 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?