The (Tri)color money

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The articles of Cassandra Crossing I'm under license CC BY-SA 4.0 | Cassandra Crossing is a column created by Marco Calamari with the "nom de plume" of Cassandra, born in 2005.

As anticipated yesterday, here is an excellent article by Cassandra on Adobe and Pantone!

This article was written on October 31, 2022 from Cassandra

Cassandra Crossing 522/ The (Tri)color money

Can standards be monetized? And is it permissible to do so?

Let's immediately clear the field of any doubts. This is a very serious episode.

The title is not a dyslexic homage to Scorsese's film, even if it uses the words. Instead, it is a patriotic episode of this column, given that it deals with the Italian flag. It could also have been titled “The (Tri)Colour Money”.

The Italian flag itself is an example of how trying to squeeze money out of every shred of knowledge can lead to absurd and, at least for Cassandra, unacceptable things.

In fact, when Cassandra inserts the tricolor in this article, in its chromatic magnificence of green, white and red, she obviously doesn't have to pay anyone.

You could incur a criminal offense if you abused it as foreseen and punished by law, but for legitimate uses like this you don't have to pay anything or anyone. Unfortunately, things have become a little less peaceful in light of a very recent IT event.

In fact, if to be more precise, as required by law (DPCM 14 April 2006), Cassandra had described the tricolor with absolute precision, and had written

“… in its chromatic magnificence of Pantone textile 17–6153 TCX (Fern Green), Pantone textile 11–0601 TCX (Bright White)and Pantone Textile 18–1662 TCX (Scarlet Red)…”

she would have come very close to having to pay.

In fact, to print a few copies of the flag, graphically described in this last way, using a newly purchased or updated copy of "Adobe Photoshop", he would have had to pay 15 dollars for a plugin, or resign himself to seeing the flag printed (it's not a joke !) like a gloomy black rectangle.

Impossible? No, as reported in this article, this is a recent innovation, announced publicly by two companies of the caliber of Adobe, producer of the "Photoshop" software, and Pantone, the company that holds the intellectual property and control of the "Pantone" commercial standard.

The Pantone standard describes in an extremely precise manner the colors used, once as now, in printing processes, and today it is extended to the colorimetry of any means of display or graphic reproduction, including digital ones. Since they are "intellectual property", Pantone colors, including their names, must be licensed in order to be used. And you pay.

Printing something using Photoshop requires using a plugin, a color library (for those in the know, an .ACB file); obviously the Photoshop software, like all the others, even the free ones, contains all the most common pre-installed color libraries.

The Pantone library was also included in Photoshop until a few days ago, but in the latest version it has been removed, and must be purchased separately at the actually modest price of 15 dollars.

Otherwise, printing anything described in terms of Pantone colors, including the Italian flag, will produce a completely black image.

Now, if it is true that patriotism has no price, commercial software has it, and now even the Pantone standard introduces costs, legally due even for printing the Italian flag.

And describing the flag in terms that require payments doesn't seem very... fair? Right? Legal? Patriotic?

But there is a solution, which Cassandra respectfully and seriously proposes, here and now.

In addition to “free software” there are also “free standards”; in the field of colorimetry, for example, there is the standard "Open Color”.

Cassandra is aware that, from a technical point of view, a modification of this kind is not as trivial as it might appear.

But given what has just happened and described above, proposes to the Presidency of the Council to redefine the colors of the tricolor in a non-commercial way, using an open, free and free standard, such as Open Color or another equivalent non-commercial standard.

Obviously it does not go so far as to suggest a choice of standard or colours, a decision which will obviously have to be delegated to the appropriate bodies.

Marco Calamari

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