Ooops Adobe Says I’m Wrong
In Adobe’s “Incorporated Terms of Use” it claims that you can not say “photoshopped” or anything of the likes because you may not use the Photoshop trademark as slang. You may not refer to their trademark as a verb, noun, possessive forms, and many others. This is quite impressive to find out how wrong I’ve been for so long. Also you can not just simply say Photoshop according to this you must refer to it as “Adobe Photoshop”. You’ve gotta love legal technicalities.
For the full list of how wrong we’ve all been for so long you may visit Adobe’s site at http://www.adobe.com/misc//trade.html#photoshop
I feel sorry for Adobe. On the one hand they’d love to have people photoshopping their pictures in the same way that people hoover their carpets. But the trouble is that the moment that “photoshop” becomes a verb meaning to process your picture digitally, the moment “hoover” becomes a verb meaning to vacuum-clean, they stop being trademarks. It has to be like that - because if “hoover” starts to be the normal English word for “vacuum clean”, what happens to Electrolux? It would be unjust to prevent them from using the standard English word to describe what their vacuum cleaners do… so Hoover have to lose their trademark.
So it’s a paradox. You want everyone to use “photoshop” as a verb because they will naturally think that to photoshop something you need Photoshop, which is good for sales… and yet if you’re too successful, “photoshop” will become part of the English language and then everyone will be allowed to use it.
Thank you for the in depth explanation of this