So, I logged into Digg today (as I do most days), and scanned the stories looking for treasures that I might have missed throughout my day. In the second place under Tech Industry News, I find the following headline:
Adobe uses ‘photoshop’ as a verb ON THEIR OWN SITE!
Ah, I see. Adobe must be making a stink about people using their trademark as a verb, much in the way Google did with theirs, and someone caught them being sloppy about it. Nice find. Curious as to who or what Adobe was complaining about, I went and searched Google News. Since the term “photoshopped” had been in general use in the media for years, I was wondering why Adobe would suddenly start making a stink now.
Strangely enough, nothing came up.
Well, Google is slow on the uptake at times. Maybe the next best place to check is Digg itself. As it turns out, I only had to scroll the page to find what I was looking for:
Adobe: “The Photoshop trademark must never be used as a verb.”
Underneath the headline, the following snippet is displayed:
“The Photoshop trademark must never be used as a common verb or as a noun. The Photoshop trademark should always be capitalized and should never be used in possessive form, or as a slang term.”
The link itself points to the Terms of Use on Adobe’s website, anchored to the section about Photoshop. I go, I read the website. I’m like, ok, so, this is the hot news, huh. Mind you, I’m not talking about something in the “Upcoming Stories” list here, I’m talking about something with (at the time of this writing) 2624 diggs and 327 comments. I’m slightly perplexed how a change to the Adobe website like this could make such a big splash and not get in the news somewhere. So I decide to look and see how it was worded before the change. Off I traipse to Archive.org. Figuring that I’ll start at the beginning, I click on the earliest cache that is shown for that page, which happens to be from October 16, 2002. And it is there that I make an amazing discovery…
One of the hottest stories on Digg is four and a half years old. The wording on Adobe’s website concerning their views on using Photoshop as a verb is exactly the same as it was in 2004!
Way to stay on top of current events there, peeps. Kudos. 🙂
That’s why we use “photochopped” 😀
Maybe we should Google it :p