[CREATE] Free and legal download of Pantone colour palettes from Adobe

["Christoph Schäfer"]

> Gesendet: Donnerstag, 28. März 2013 um 05:55 Uhr
> Von: "Guillermo Espertino (Gez)" <gespertino at gmail.com>
> An: create at lists.freedesktop.org
> Betreff: Re: [CREATE] Free and legal download of Pantone colour palettes from Adobe
>
> El 28/03/13 00:14, "Christoph Schäfer" escribió:
>
> > I did not mean to say otherwise. This is good news for *individual users*, who now can, thanks to Olivier's creation Swatchbooker, easily download these palettes and convert them to a format their Libre program can use. That's all, b*ut for many users that's already a lot. It should also be mentioned that these palettes include only the traditional Pantone Color Bridge palettes, not Pantone Goe or Pantone Plus.
>
>
> Swatchbooker Batch Converter has always had a feature to download
> Pantone palettes from Pantone X-Ref site and convert them into usable
> palettes for libre graphics packages.
> I used that feature and created gpl palettes for GIMP and Inkscape from
> the Pantone Formula books (originally in Lab) and xml palettes for
> Scribus from the Formula and Bridge books.
> I even created a Pantone Palette for OpenOffice :-)
>
> So, what exactly does the the publishing of those packages change?
>
> Gez
>
> p.s.: Oh, and btw, the batch converter also gets Goe and fashion books
> from X-Ref.

What the downloading option in SwatchBooker does is accessing public data for an iPhone app, and what you get is RGB values which are not intended for use in professional publishing. The files made available by Adobe are spot/CMYK/RGB colours stored as L*a*b*. In other words, in terms of professional publishing, the data downloaded by SwatchBooker are toys, whereas the data made available by Adobe are "the real thing".

Moreover, consider yourself lucky that Pantone hasn't unleashed an army of lawyers on you yet ;) Maybe this is due to your jurisdiction, but it is unthinkable that Pantone wouldn't object to the distribution of their digital colour palettes without a proper licence agreement. The web is full of sites that used to list Pantone colours but were forced to remove them after Pantone threatened legal action. Whether we like it or not (in terms of results), Pantone is just as entitled to use copyright and trademark protection for their purposes as are Free Software and Open Content projects. If we don't respect the rights of others, we lose the moral rights to enforce our own Free and Open licenses. It could also seal doors that are currently closed, but may be opened in the future (think of IBM, for instance): "Constant dripping wears away the stone."


Cheers,

Christoph