this from the adobe website . How out of touch are these guys? Your program (photoshop) is the industry standard photo manipulating program. Everybody says ‘its photoshopped’ or ‘I photoshopped it’. Whats the beef? They should be proud its become a commonly used noun etc.
INCORRECT: “the senator was ridiculed with Photoshop”
Toilets. Its common language now fools, get with the program. :smack:
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They have to. If they don’t actively maintain their trademark, they risk having it turn into a generic term that anyone can use whenever and wherever they want, even other companies talking about their own products. Once that’s happened, the brand has zero value as a corporate asset, and since the Adobe brand is probably the biggest asset they have, it’s a matter of some concern.
but they have a great precedents. Sellotape. and Duck Tape. It’s hard to imagine that either of these companies have been damaged by their names becoming the popular reference name.
aside from the copywrite issues, their attempt at control of language is a bit pathetic.
I’m sure Hoover® and Biro® never made the same demands.
Do you mean that? I mean, “Coke” being used for any coke-like soft drink I’m sure helps coke, because you order it aloud, but if you buy “sellotape” aren’t you likely to walk to a store and buy the first thing that looks like sellotape? Do you know if it’s actually made by that company? I don’t.
True, but is it not also the case that if it has “Sellotape” written above it, you are more likely to buy it if you are looking for sellotape?
Um, Duck Tape didn’t become the popular reference name. The item in question, used for sealing A/C and heating ducts, is called “duct tape,” and it existed long before the Duck Tape people named their product.
In short, the folks who market Duck Tape took the generic name of the product, altered it slightly, and glommed onto it as their own. In effect, they’re just taking advantage of the fact that most people don’t enunciate clearly enough to pronounce “duct” properly, particularly when the following word starts with a “t.”
Sort of the reverse of the situation being discussed in the OP.
I’m not. I don’t even notice what is written there really.
I assume you do? I had assumed people were like maybe, but I realise they may be like you; if so I suppose there is an advantage in being generic.
well, Sellotape (the brand) tends to have a logo that says “Sellotape” on it. Other brands tend to be called ‘adhesive tape’.
Does anybody actually use anything else apart from photoshop to photoshop images? ‘hey,check this out, I microsoft painted it!’
I dont think so
Perhaps they haven’t and perhaps they have. In any case, a bunch of trademarked names, including Aspirin, Zipper and (interestingly) Cellophane have indeed lost their trademark through overuse of the “generic” form. Adobe is just trying to protect their name.
After all, you wouldn’t necessarily buy “Adobe-brand Photoshop” if you could get “cheaper-brand Photoshop”.
As I think about it, the same is true of Sellotape as of Duck Tape (see my post above). There was “cellophane tape” long before there was a brand name called Sellotape. The company appropriated the generic name.
This is the reverse of the situation being discussed in the OP. More proper analogies would be referring to tissues as Kleenex, photocopies as Xeroxes, or cellophane tape as Scotch Tape, situations in which a brand name became the generic name, not the other way around.
Of course, while companies trying to prevent generication, the actual page is rather funny to read. Even in protected trademarks it’s a lost battle to get everyone to never use the phrase as a noun, and say ® afterwards whenever they use it.
I doubt that it will ever become generic enough for them to lose the copyright to “photoshop”, ala Aspirin.
Actually, yes they do.
Maybe not Microsoft Paint, but there is image manipulation software other than photoshop on the market.
I process my digital photographs using Photoshop, but i know that many other people use Jasc’s Paint Shop Pro because it has excellent features and is much cheaper than Photoshop. Corel also produces products that perform similar tasks.
Also, most digital cameras come with image manipulation software that allows the user to modify things like contract and brightness, as well as to resize images and add special effects. I’d be willing to bet that many digital camera owners just use this software instead of forking out for the more expensive stuff.
Photoshop might be a sort of benchmark, but it’s definitely not the only product on the market.
There’s also The Gimp.
Oddly enough (and I was surprised to find this out myself), the original name was Duck Tape (another cite here), because it was waterproof like a duck and was made out of cotton “duck” cloth. The name “Duct Tape” came later after it started being used to fix ducts.
That might explain why in a recent study they found that it works great on almost any job requiring tape… except fixing ducts.
Aluminum duct tape is the best for ducts usually, it’s a bit more expensive though.
True, and Xerox and Kleenex are even more fanatical than Adobe about not wanting people to use their brand names as generic terms.
Whether its a losing battle or not, the fact that they’re actively fighting it works in their favor should they ever go to court in an actual trademark dispute. By showing evidence that they’re making efforts to keep it from becoming generic, a court is more likely to find that the Photoshop brand belongs to them and nobody else.