As far as I'm aware Pantone has always tried to claim copyright over their set of colours, despite this being an extremely questionable interpretation of copyright law.

There have been web-based colour scheme designers who had to remove Pantone colour support from their applications after getting a nastygram from Pantone.

It would be interesting if someone took Pantone to court on this and called BS on their legal claims.

This kind of thing is why people don't update software and why it's important for users to always have that as an option.

I know programmers are prone to legal hacks that don't make sense, but I'm curious whether the following would work.

As I understand it, it's ok to reference a Pantone Color by name without a license (nominative fair use), but that gives you no idea how to use or display it. So photoshop files could store both the pantone color name (for printing and profressional color matching purposes) and a substitute color for display on screen when unlicensed.

The UI would either prompt users for the substitute color, or automatically fill it if they did have a license at the time they selected the color. That way files wouldn't break quite so horribly when licenses expire.

Discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33370265

TLDR: It's about using Pantone product names. Using the respective RGB/CMYK values still works fine.