Wired reports that Adobe Systems secretly inserted some code into Adobe Photoshop.

Adobe Systems acknowledged Friday it quietly added technology to the world's best-known graphics software at the request of government regulators and international bankers to prevent consumers from making copies of the world's major currencies.

Is this bad? Well, it sure is to hear some folks talk.

The U.S. Federal Reserve and other organizations that worked on the technology said they could not disclose how it works and would not name which other software companies include it in their products. They cited concerns that counterfeiters would try to defeat it.

"We sort of knew this would come out eventually," Adobe spokesman Russell Brady said. "We can't really talk about the technology itself."

. . .

Angry customers have flooded Adobe's Internet message boards with complaints about censorship and concerns over future restrictions on other types of images, such as copyrighted or adult material.

"I don't believe this," said Stephen M. Burns, president of the Photoshop users group in San Diego. "This shocks me. Artists don't like to be limited in what they can do with their tools. Let the U.S. government or whoever is involved deal with this, but don't take the powers of the government and place them into a commercial software package."

Connor [Adobe's product manager] said the company's decision to use the technology was "not a step down the road towards Adobe becoming Big Brother."

Just an observation: anybody else notice how many big brothers we have out there these days? Once upon a time, it was big government, now it's big business, or something like that. It's probably ZOG or the Rhodes Scholars or the Illuminati (I read an interesting short story recently that suggested the world was run by a shadowy organization descended from Richard III). Don't get me wrong: I am frequently concerned about privacy issues myself. But I just wish we could tone down the rhetoric already.

I'm not specifically in favor of this, but at the very least I can understand it. Arguably, it's relatively similar to the technology associated with copy machines, in which they don't produce an exact copy in order to prevent the same basic thing: namely, the production of money. And certainly the development of sophisticated scanners, color laser printers, and digital imagery software makes counterfeiting easier than ever before (according to the Bureau of Engraving, they routinely have to develop new counterfeit-deterrent features in response to "advances in reprographic technologies"). So there's obviously a very logical reason for the incorporation of this type of provision into graphics software.

The responses seem to be (a) artists like to have complete control over their software; (b) this is a bad precedent and could lead to other things being prohibited (i.e., the "slippery slope" argument); and (c) does Adobe really know that this is all the code does?

Of the three, both (a) and (b) seem poor arguments. First of all, while I'm not certain how Photoshop displays an image of money (the problem here), I assume it's still possible to fashion a reasonable facsimile of money for "artistic" purposes. Unless Mr. Burns is really saying that his "artists" just don't want to be limited in the number of $20 bills they're able to make.