The popular Flash stock site Flashden, has been ordered to remove Flash from their url and branding by the Adobe legal team (which I hope are not reading this blog). They have decided upon the rather awkward sounding Activeden.

Adobe have something of a tradition of aggressively protecting their apparent trademarks, even if the words are as common as “air” or “flash”. James Whittaker (freshAIRApps), Kelvin Luck (shAIR) and Geoff Stearns (flashObject) can all attest to this. Clearly the Adobe legal team has enough sway to make these sites change names – without much resistance.

Some of you will argue that Adobe has to do this, that is the only way to ensure the brand is not diluted. Its just a legal question that any large company would pursue. The problem is what all of these sites have in common is they were actively promoting Adobe brands. Flashden in particular is one of Adobe’s biggest evangelists, introducing more people to the Flash platform than any Adobe owned site could ever dream of.

Legal questions aside, these kind of actions do nothing for the goodwill of the very people who are looking to promote the technology. If Adobe can`t be more creative in enforcing these trademarks, many will soon become disillusioned with the company. Adobe must realise these seemingly ridiculous law suits are starting to make them look like the 800lb gorilla in the room.

Buy Stock Flash (a name built for SEO!) is one of the newest contenders to enter the competitive Flash stock market. Clearly inspired by the success of companies like envato, they have a rapidly expanding network of stock & tutorial based sites, after just one year.

iStock was something of a pioneer; it was one of the first sites to start selling Flash files. However, it is and always will be, a photography marketplace first. Flash is a something of an afterthought here. That said, any site that can sell an image every 1.4 seconds should not be overlooked when it comes to any other digital downloads.

Flash Components is a dedicated Flash file marketplace established in 2001. Anyone can apply to be an author and each file is reviewed before upload.