What Is the Color of Greed or Will a Color Picker Land You in Court?
October 31, 2022
When I arrived in Washington, DC, for my first real job at a nuclear consulting company loved by Richard Cheney, I found myself responsible for a contractor on K Street. At that meeting, the contractor explained that the Cheney fave used a specific color of blue to indicate nuclear radiation. Do you have a color in mind for Cherenkov radiation. I do. The printed color came from a thick and somewhat weird collection of color samples bound with a rivet through the heavy pages. Each page contained a group of colors; for example, PMS 313. I said, “Okay, with me.” (The P represents Pantone; the numbers are the presumably proprietary colors once happily confided to the dead tree printing world.)
On my Mac I have an application called ColorSlurp. No printed collection of color chips needed. Just look at a picture in Yandex images for Cherenkov radiation and click on a color. I can then use that color in a painting application like the estimable Paint.net software.
The color technology seems like magic to me. I can, for example, create a pdf of the goose which I use for my logo tinted a wonderful mélange of dead leaf brown and feather gray. Am I in legal jeopardy?
I just read “ You’re Going to Have To Pay to Use Some Fancy Colors In Photoshop Now.” The article explains much about color intellectual property and nothing about frequency. However, I noted this statement:
widely used Adobe apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign will no longer support Pantone-owned colors for free, and those wishing for those colors to appear in their saved files will need to pay for a separate license. And this is real life.
Okay, a subscription to a frequency. I assume this makes sense to CPAs, MBAs, and the Adobe/Pantone crowd.
The point is that cloud services make it easy to monetize that which was more difficult to monetize in Gutenberg’s day.
I think we have discovered a color for greed. That color is linked to the color of attorneys and legal eagle feathers. I don’t want to name a color, present a P number, or include its frequency.
Let’s think about “real life.” Pleasant, isn’t it. What color of brown are the walls in most courtrooms tinted? There must be a PMS number for that. I think it is a combo of fertile loam and Cherenkov radiation. If you see it, it is too late.
Stephen E Arnold, October 31, 2022
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