You wouldn't steal a font
fedi.rib.gay
You wouldn't steal a font
1–10 of 421 posts
Re: You wouldn't steal a font
#2I would, and I have.
Re: You wouldn't steal a font
#3I would, and I have.
It's fresh takes like this that keep me coming back to HN, year after year.
Re: You wouldn't steal a font
#4That is an absolutely brilliant turn of events – strong evidence that the font in an anti-piracy campaign was itself arguably a copyright-infringing knock-off.
Someone should sue FACT for copyright infringement – and refuse to settle.
Re: You wouldn't steal a font
#5I was curious who was behind this campaign - it has a wikipedia page (answer: FACT and MPAA):
Re: You wouldn't steal a font
#6That is an absolutely brilliant turn of events – strong evidence that the font in an anti-piracy campaign was itself arguably a copyright-infringing knock-off. Someone should sue FACT for copyright infringement – and refuse to settle.
You can't copyright a font.
Re: You wouldn't steal a font
#7I know we don't really do humor on HN, but working in the car industry, this comedic Aussie rebuttal always amused me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fb7N-JtQWGI
Re: You wouldn't steal a font
#8That is an absolutely brilliant turn of events – strong evidence that the font in an anti-piracy campaign was itself arguably a copyright-infringing knock-off. Someone should sue FACT for copyright infringement – and refuse to settle.
You can't copyright a font.
They absolutely are copyrighted and big money.
Re: You wouldn't steal a font
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't copyright a font.
They absolutely are copyrighted and big money.
In the US you can't copyright the shape of a font. You can copyright the programmatic description of a font.
Design patents have been awarded for fonts. Trademark and trade dress protections could apply to the specific use of a font but not the font itself. The name of a font itself can be protected by trademark, as well.
It's kind of a fascinating topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...
Edit: Back in the mid-90s versions of Corel Draw came with a Truetype editor. A friend of mine made "knock off" versions of fonts they liked from magazines, etc, and made them freely available on his ISP-provided web space. They drew them by hand, using printed samples as the inspiration.
Over the years they got some angry messages from a few "type people" who didn't like that they'd made freely available knock-offs of various fonts. (I remember that "Keedy Sans" is one they knocked-off and got a particularly angry email about.)
Further aside: My fiend made a sans serif typeface that has a distinct pattern of "erosion" at the edges and voids within the letters. It's easy to tell when it's the font he made. For the last 30 years I've kept samples of the various places I've seen it used, both on the Internet and on physical articles. I find it so amazing that a TTF file made by a kid in Corel Draw in 1994 or 1995 ended up being used in advertisements, on packaging, etc.
Re: You wouldn't steal a font
#10Having worked in the graphic design industry during the 90's, no. There's no way I'd have just slipped a font I didn't own on a disk and sent it off to a printer. When it comes to fonts for coding... sure there was that ONE time I snagged Operator Mono for an extended "trial". I still believe in paying for things that I use on a daily basis, so I switched back to Sauce Code Pro or something.