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Comment by afrcnc | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

Don't use Pantone 123 in your product because that's Fluke trade dress. =)

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.

Fluke and the sister measurement companies (like Tek) were spun out of Danaher in 2016 and are now called Fortive. More corporate shenanigans.

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.

Ahh, interesting, good to know, thank you. I've been outside of that world for a while.

https://www.redbubble.com/i/skirt/Pantone-123C-by-palmea1/21...

That dress seems to be doing just fine

Why don't we have a public domain standard to discuss colors the same way?

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.

What you can't do is brand a product with them.

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?

Sooo what would stop someone from just producing say "mantone-123" color that's same as "pantone-123" color ?

Did they patent every single proportion of paint mixture or what ?

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.

Note that not all Pantone colors can be matched exactly in a 4-color CMYK process.

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.

People use Pantone because they want to get colors that don't exist in CMYK. It's what makes Pantone worth paying for.

I think it's physical properties like coating, which yeah do have a large impact.

This is true. And you can also drag a Pantone color into a swatch and rename the color. Problem solved.

Everything is physics. That's not an argument against copyright or patents.

Anyway the OP is about Pantome's databases, not the colors or their RGB descriptions themselves.

Pantone colors are not RGB but CMYK, plus there is a number of non-CMYK paints and printing inks for spot colors which use Pantone color names.

> Everything is physics.

Not everything.[1]

[1] https://xkcd.com/435/

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