Deluxe Paint: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

Deluxe Paint (DPaint) 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, but only had killer app status on the Amiga.

DPaint 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, DPaint was quickly released for it. It was quickly embraced by the Amiga community and became the standard graphics development tool for the platform. Amiga manufacturer Commodore International later struck a deal with EA to have DPaint (and later its four "sequels", versions 2, 3, 4 and 5) bundled with every new Amiga sold. This deal lasted until Commodore's bankruptcy in 1994.

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 in its early releases. EA argued that they held the copyright on any image created with DPaint 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 pens and paper could claim copyrights on any books written with their tools). EA's case, while not groundbreaking by legal standards, was interesting nonetheless.