6 ms·

This is a result of trademark law rather than any particular idiocy on the part of Adobe. Guidelines like this get made fun of on the internet fairly regularly,

by tikhonj 15y ago

This is a result of trademark law rather than any particular idiocy on the part of Adobe. Guidelines like this get made fun of on the internet fairly regularly, but it's always the company that's ridiculed rather than the laws. Ultimately, any company that wants to hold on to its trademarks has to do something like this.

Natsu 15y ago
Yep. They want to avoid it becoming generic. They're far too late, though, to stop photoshopping from becoming a verb because these guidelines have been completely ignored by almost everyone for a long time now.
- paganel 15y ago
  > They want to avoid it becoming generic. I don't understand why would they do that, though.
  - michael_dorfman 15y ago
    Because once it become generic, other people can start selling products called Photoshop. Suddenly, there'd be Microsoft Photoshop and Adobe Photoshop and Canon Photoshop and who knows what else, and they are afraid they'd lose their dominance in the market.
    - erez 15y ago
      Having a generic brand name doesn't mean other companies can do that, as there is no legal term defining generic brand names (i.e. a brand name that became synonymous with a product). What does happen is that people start referring to other products using the brand name, and you might lose the identity of your product. If people use "to google" for performing an Internet search, it can mean they will automatically use Google.com, which Google want, but it also could mean people will start "google" stuff using bing, or duckduckgo.com and if the term becomes generic enough, it will lose the immediate attachment it has to the actual search engine. Another issue is that it carries connotation. When you say "This model was photoshopped to look thinner/prettier/etc." you create a negative connotation with the brand. Adobe fears people will hear "photoshop" and immediately think "falsifying images, creating false reality, hiding stuff" etc. It also causes the brand to be identified with a single product, which in Adobe's case is not such a huge deal, as Photoshop is the product, but in other brands, like Apple, or Google (again), means a whole slew of products across different fields, this is also why the Apple sign was removed from the Macintosh' keyboard.
      - michael_dorfman 15y ago
        Having a generic brand name doesn't mean other companies can do that, as there is no legal term defining generic brand names (i.e. a brand name that became synonymous with a product). Actually, it means exactly that-- as you can tell by the number of companies selling "aspirin" or "cellophane" or "linoleum". Trademark is precisely the protection that prevents others from selling a product with your name (or one so similar as to be easily confused.)
  - Hyena 15y ago
    It kills the trademark. Once something becomes generic, anyone can use it. So a competitor could say "we produce the best photoshop software" because the term is now simply a word for editing photos digitally rather than for a specific product from Adobe.
zb 15y ago
Why should the laws be ridiculed? They prevent companies from promoting their trade marks as generic terms and then claiming a monopoly on them - rather like the old days when people would sneak patented technologies into IEEE standards and the like and then demand royalties from everyone who implemented them. If the cost to society of preventing this is limited to one mildly absurdist press release per company, it seems like a pretty good law.
- tikhonj 15y ago
  My point wasn't so much that the law should be ridiculed as if something is to be ridiculed, it should probably be the law rather than the company. In practice, I agree with you: I actually think trademark law is completely reasonable--it's just that the most reasonable course of action involves companies doing things which can appear silly. And when people see companies doing silly things, they almost inevitably want to ridicule them, usually with good reason.

by tikhonj 15y ago

Natsu 15y ago

Yep. They want to avoid it becoming generic. They're far too late, though, to stop photoshopping from becoming a verb because these guidelines have been completely ignored by almost everyone for a long time now.

paganel 15y ago
> They want to avoid it becoming generic. I don't understand why would they do that, though.
- michael_dorfman 15y ago
  Because once it become generic, other people can start selling products called Photoshop. Suddenly, there'd be Microsoft Photoshop and Adobe Photoshop and Canon Photoshop and who knows what else, and they are afraid they'd lose their dominance in the market.
  - erez 15y ago
    Having a generic brand name doesn't mean other companies can do that, as there is no legal term defining generic brand names (i.e. a brand name that became synonymous with a product). What does happen is that people start referring to other products using the brand name, and you might lose the identity of your product. If people use "to google" for performing an Internet search, it can mean they will automatically use Google.com, which Google want, but it also could mean people will start "google" stuff using bing, or duckduckgo.com and if the term becomes generic enough, it will lose the immediate attachment it has to the actual search engine. Another issue is that it carries connotation. When you say "This model was photoshopped to look thinner/prettier/etc." you create a negative connotation with the brand. Adobe fears people will hear "photoshop" and immediately think "falsifying images, creating false reality, hiding stuff" etc. It also causes the brand to be identified with a single product, which in Adobe's case is not such a huge deal, as Photoshop is the product, but in other brands, like Apple, or Google (again), means a whole slew of products across different fields, this is also why the Apple sign was removed from the Macintosh' keyboard.
    - michael_dorfman 15y ago
      Having a generic brand name doesn't mean other companies can do that, as there is no legal term defining generic brand names (i.e. a brand name that became synonymous with a product). Actually, it means exactly that-- as you can tell by the number of companies selling "aspirin" or "cellophane" or "linoleum". Trademark is precisely the protection that prevents others from selling a product with your name (or one so similar as to be easily confused.)
- Hyena 15y ago
  It kills the trademark. Once something becomes generic, anyone can use it. So a competitor could say "we produce the best photoshop software" because the term is now simply a word for editing photos digitally rather than for a specific product from Adobe.

zb 15y ago

Why should the laws be ridiculed? They prevent companies from promoting their trade marks as generic terms and then claiming a monopoly on them - rather like the old days when people would sneak patented technologies into IEEE standards and the like and then demand royalties from everyone who implemented them. If the cost to society of preventing this is limited to one mildly absurdist press release per company, it seems like a pretty good law.

tikhonj 15y ago
My point wasn't so much that the law should be ridiculed as if something is to be ridiculed, it should probably be the law rather than the company. In practice, I agree with you: I actually think trademark law is completely reasonable--it's just that the most reasonable course of action involves companies doing things which can appear silly. And when people see companies doing silly things, they almost inevitably want to ridicule them, usually with good reason.