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You wouldn't steal a font

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Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#251

Post by econ »

al_borland wrote: post #108
phony-account wrote: post #24

Is this the wrong time to rant about font licensing though? I’ve always bought and paid for fonts, but as I’ve gradually transitioned to mobile app development, I one day realized that all the fonts I bought for print are now worthless to me. These crazy outdated licenses that let you print as many magazines or books you want forever, for a one-time price. But if your hobby is making apps, then suddenly the same font…

I've only purchased one font, which I use in my editor and terminal, so I don't have to worry much about the license. I can't be bothered to use custom fonts for any projects. With all the licensing considerations it just makes me cut out the whole idea to simplify my life.

Send in the LLMs!

Jokes aside, I'm not very impressed with this single color font art. Maybe in 30 years we will have 16 color fonts?

The color fonts currently work in Firefox and Edge, Safari support SBIX, Chrome on Android has CBDT

I can barely find a website that has an example. The ones I found have a few characters or a single sentence, very few fonts and they are not very pretty. Some of the implementations warn that the client might catch fire.

I'm not impressed.

Some random examples of the state of the art.

https://www.throwup.it/en/artists/mars/

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#252

Post by Dylan16807 »

tptacek wrote: post #216
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hermes doesn't forbid you from wearing your watch or charge 10x more for you to wear it while playing a mobile game. I think a lot of the anger is more about the complexity and price discrimination than the absolute price.

If Hermès did forbid me from carrying my (hypothetical) wallet more than 3 times a week, I simply would not buy that wallet. It would not become a moral crusade.

But they'd deserve to be mocked in public. Complaining about something is usually not an attempt to make a moral crusade.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#253

Post by mlx0x »

gkoberger wrote: post #141
lolinder wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even under this analogy you're complaining about the price of luxury goods and saying that it's no wonder people shoplift to steal the truffles because they're so darn expensive. If you can't afford the license for the font, your app is small-time enough that you can make do with one of the many, many high-quality fonts that are available for free, there's no need to pirate it. If your app is big enough that the diff…

No, I'm saying a Michelin chef can complain about a 50x increase in the cost of truffles without negating the fact that a lot of people happily survive on ramen.

Where’s the car in this analogy?

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#255

Post by grishka »

fooker wrote: post #244
grishka wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the country. I researched it for Russia recently and apparently the law is much stricter about fonts here than in the US. Both the character shapes and the "code" are copyrightable so you ain't getting away with converting it into a different format either. Companies did get sued over this and did have to pay millions of rubles in fines and licensing fees for their past usage. Not sure about individuals bu…

Huh, this is interesting. Given that Russia has been the hub of internet piracy for theast three decades.

That's because copyright in Russia is only enforced for companies. If you pirate something for personal use, no one would care, thankfully.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#256

Post by tptacek »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #252
tptacek wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Hermès did forbid me from carrying my (hypothetical) wallet more than 3 times a week, I simply would not buy that wallet. It would not become a moral crusade.

But they'd deserve to be mocked in public. Complaining about something is usually not an attempt to make a moral crusade.

Why? Everybody can just not buy the wallet if they care about this term of use. Who's being harmed?

This isn't nitpicking. At some point you're really effectively just arguing that there should be a ceiling on what you can charge for a typeface. That's not an argument that respects the art and craft of type design; it's one that privileges convenience.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#257

Post by Dylan16807 »

tptacek wrote: post #256
Dylan16807 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they'd deserve to be mocked in public. Complaining about something is usually not an attempt to make a moral crusade.

Why? Everybody can just not buy the wallet if they care about this term of use. Who's being harmed? This isn't nitpicking. At some point you're really effectively just arguing that there should be a ceiling on what you can charge for a typeface. That's not an argument that respects the art and craft of type design; it's one that privileges convenience.

> Why? Everybody can just not buy the wallet if they care about this term of use. Who's being harmed?

Either because it's ridiculous and fun to laugh at, or to scare other companies off the idea, or both.

It being a luxury product that people can avoid is not a reason to keep my mouth shut.

> At some point you're really effectively just arguing that there should be a ceiling on what you can charge for a typeface. That's not an argument that respects the art and craft of type design; it's one that privileges convenience.

Okay, to switch back to typefaces, I don't get the impression they're complaining about the high end, I get the impression they're complaining about the average.

And if an entire class of product suddenly becomes luxury with onerous terms... that sucks! Do complain! It was working fine before!

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#258

Post by wubrr »

tptacek wrote: post #247
wubrr wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree that it might not be the best, but seems like a fairly appropriate response for someone trying to back up their rhetoric with 'thousands of books out there'. How is it 'made to impress bystanders'?

Who cares? They're part of a line of argumentation that dunks on the typography work of Matthew Carter. This is very much the same thing as a thread on industrial design dunking on Dieter Rams. You don't get angry at that kind of argument; you laugh at it.

Oh I was never angry, I was enjoying the argument (maybe that makes me combative, oh well), and I was completely open to being proven wrong and thereby becoming more informed on the topic... alas...

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#259

Post by tptacek »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #257
tptacek wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Everybody can just not buy the wallet if they care about this term of use. Who's being harmed? This isn't nitpicking. At some point you're really effectively just arguing that there should be a ceiling on what you can charge for a typeface. That's not an argument that respects the art and craft of type design; it's one that privileges convenience.

> Why? Everybody can just not buy the wallet if they care about this term of use. Who's being harmed? Either because it's ridiculous and fun to laugh at, or to scare other companies off the idea, or both. It being a luxury product that people can avoid is not a reason to keep my mouth shut. > At some point you're really effectively just arguing that there should be a ceiling on what you can charge for a typeface. Tha…

But that clearly isn't happening. You have never had more access to high-end typefaces than you do today. What people are mad about is the licensing attached to --- literally --- the Hermès of type design. To get higher-level than the targets of these complaints you have to get into bespoke design.

This came up earlier in the thread, and I kept someone else on the hook on this: I honestly think that it would be a good thing for the world if font licensing got more onerous, not less. Type design is a very difficult field to make a living in, and the world could use more of it. The social cost of making high-end type more expensive is negative, not positive.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#260

Post by wubrr »

tptacek wrote: post #245
wubrr wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You’ve been combative throughout this thread Disagreeing with you doesn't mean I'm combative. (Not that I care) > typography or design as disciplines that warrant serious thought. We are talking about fonts here, more specifically fonts used in software, more specifically the quality of free fonts used in software. Not 'design' as a whole which is much more than that. > System fonts are the absolute bottom of the b…

You should care if you're being combatative, but, even more importantly, quoting previous comments the way you're doing doesn't work well on HN and is also a flamewar trope. Everybody can read the comments you're responding to. Just refer back to them in prose. A single quote, maybe 2 in a long comment, fine, but what you're doing now creates the impression that you're sort of rebutting what the previous commenter sa…

I am rebutting what the previous commenter said, sentence by sentence (almost), I don't know why that tells you that I'm not actually thinking about what they said though. Did I misunderstand or misrepresent something they said?
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