Deluxe Paint

Deluxe Paint is a paint program created by Dan Silva for Electronic Arts (EA). The original version was created for the Amiga and was released in November 1985. It was eventually ported to other platforms.

Deluxe Paint was the product of an in-house art development tool called Prism. As Silva added more features to Prism, it started to have market-place potential. When the Amiga was released in 1985, Deluxe Paint was quickly released for it. It was quickly embraced by the Amiga community and became the standard graphics development tool for the platform.

With the development of Deluxe Paint, EA introduced the ILBM standard for graphics. It was widely used for the Amiga, but never gained widespread acceptance on other platforms.

A minor bit of legal controversy surrounded images created with Deluxe Paint (DP) in its early releases. EA argued that they held the copyright on any image created with DP since they held the copyright to the tool itself. The courts determined, however, that they did not own the copyrights of works created with the program. If so, makers of compilers or other software tools could claim ownership of properties created with their products (and by extension, makers of hammers and saws could claim copyrights on any houses or structures created with their tools). EA's case, while not groundbreaking by legal standards, was interesting nonetheless.

See also: computer software