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You wouldn't steal a font

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Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#281

Post by asimpletune »

scripturial wrote: post #262
rglover wrote: post #94

I would happily pay for any font if I could get individual weights for say $5-$10 and entire families for $20-100 with any usage I want (print, web, etc). I feel like font foundries would print money this way. But for most projects, $300+ for a nice family (that can only be used in a hyper-specific context) is just insane when many free or cheaper alternatives exist. Used to waste time and money with foundry stuff un…

I suspect it is probably right that they would find it more profitable to sell 100 copies for $10 than 1 copy for $1000. But I do wonder, it could be that the occasional $10,000 sale to a large company pays more in the long run for less hassle. It’s hard to know. Do any creative agencies release their sales information? I’d say there should at least be a small niece for a company to profit off the back of less expens…

Part of the value may be in how exclusive the font seems. So in that view 1 sale of $1000 is more valuable because it’s more exclusive. Basically, one potential attribute of fonts is they’re a luxury not a commodity.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#282

Post by lawn »

Suppafly wrote: post #97
codedokode wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not every font is digitized from old samples.

They are still mostly derivative works in basically every sense.

This broad generalization can apply to any creative endeavor such as music, movies, books, and TV series you know?

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#283

Post by johnisgood »

gkoberger wrote: post #109
tptacek wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is maybe nothing in the entire world that I am less sympathetic towards than the cause of font piracy / font liberation. You have perfectly good --- in fact, historically excellent --- fonts loaded by default for free on any computer you buy today. Arguing for the oppression of font licenses is, to me, like arguing about how much it costs to buy something at Hermès. Just don't shop at Hermès.

I agree the average person is likely fine with the fonts on their computer, but this is profoundly misunderstanding the importance of design. Typefaces are incredibly important, and have been for centuries. I'd argue that complaining about font prices is less like a Hermes bag, and more like complaining about high-end ingredients when a supermarket has cheap stuff. Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when co…

> Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer.

This heavily depends. As I mentioned before, cheaper materials did not always mean shittier, especially when it comes to cooking. Around here, healthy food is still cheaper (especially the ingredients) than junk food, although the recent increase in prices (of everything) is wild.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#284

Post by nine_k »

hnfong wrote: post #276
gkoberger wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree the average person is likely fine with the fonts on their computer, but this is profoundly misunderstanding the importance of design. Typefaces are incredibly important, and have been for centuries. I'd argue that complaining about font prices is less like a Hermes bag, and more like complaining about high-end ingredients when a supermarket has cheap stuff. Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when co…

If you often use custom fonts that aren't preinstalled on typical systems, I can't help but wonder whether you also painstakingly choose fonts for non-latin character/non-latin based languages? I'll admit opening a can of worms on purpose, but if you're going for the "high-end", ignoring the i18n implications seems like a crime on its own, and yet most people don't really have the design expertise to evaluate whether…

Non-Latin? Well, OK, Greek and Cyrillic are close enough to Latin to be able to design the font for them following approximately the same style which apply to the Latin characters. You can make a Cyrillic Tahoma or a Greek Signika in line with the Latin variants. I'd say that this is the reasonable limit of non-latin support.

If you take Hebrew, Korean, Georgian, Armenian, Thai, hiragana, katakana, you're in trouble. They all have different proportions, traditions, connections. You can stylize them a bit to be reminiscent of the way the Latin font is made, but you'll have hard time making a Hebrew font with large serifs like Bodoni, and will have hard time making it materially different from Times New Roman in a convincing way. It's better to make a separate typeface.

Arabic / Persian / Urdu, or hanji are their own worlds altogether, hardly comparable to Western typography.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#285

Post by efitz »

I spent some time last weekend playing with LLMs and SVGs- it turns out SVG is a domain specific language and LLMs know how to use it. I was able to get an LLM (grok from X.ai) to author SVGs from a description of what I wanted it to look like, and to modify existing SVG text to customize files that weren’t perfectly to my liking.

Fonts are also written in domain specific languages, I need to experiment with whether LLMs can author or modify fonts.

I do not think that the ridiculous terms that font and clip art and stock photo companies now offer, is going to be a viable business model in a couple of years.

We will all be able to use (for example) “LLM Helvetica Free” without any license.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#286

Post by ghaff »

behringer wrote: post #274
dcow wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typography is important. So important that we have really good looking fonts available for free. And a custom font isn’t going to be the deciding factor in whether your next AI powered social graph app sinks or floats. Guaranteed.

Then why are the fonts so expensive?

Because designers fuss a lot about nearly undetectable differences in color, fonts, and many other things. Maybe they make a difference in the aggregate. But if you can’t identify the difference between Ariak and Helvetica (to pick a particularly glaring example) you’re probably not one of those designers.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#287

Post by nine_k »

gkoberger wrote: post #109
tptacek wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is maybe nothing in the entire world that I am less sympathetic towards than the cause of font piracy / font liberation. You have perfectly good --- in fact, historically excellent --- fonts loaded by default for free on any computer you buy today. Arguing for the oppression of font licenses is, to me, like arguing about how much it costs to buy something at Hermès. Just don't shop at Hermès.

I agree the average person is likely fine with the fonts on their computer, but this is profoundly misunderstanding the importance of design. Typefaces are incredibly important, and have been for centuries. I'd argue that complaining about font prices is less like a Hermes bag, and more like complaining about high-end ingredients when a supermarket has cheap stuff. Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when co…

There is a large number of free qualify fonts available at fonts.google.com, many of them are free for commercial use outside the web. There is also a handful of pretty good fonts not included in that collection but also freely available. (This is on top of good collections of fonts shipped with major OSes.)

There is a number of free fonts which are also free for commercial use, but are clearly inadequate for serious typographic work, or only contain highly stylized glyphs. They may still be perfectly usable for a game, or a mobile app which is not typography-heavy. In many cases, the shortcomings are only visible at paper resolution, or only in print as opposed to screen.

Then, there is a number of not very expensive fonts that cost $50-100 per face. If you really badly need a font exactly like that for a commercial project, and $200-300 is a prohibitively expensive for a permanent license you obtain, how much is the commercial project worth? Is it worth sweating over that very particular font?

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#288

Post by ars »

codedokode wrote: post #197
ars wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren't inventing a new letter shapes - letters already exist. You are modifying how they look, and that's not considered creative enough. There are lots of things that can't be copyrighted. For example you can't copyright an anatomy drawing: https://www.skeletaldrawing.com/licensing (i.e. the layout of the bones, etc) but you can copyright your specific drawing - but someone else could draw in the same style and…

You can say the same about drawing of a cat: you are not inventing new animal here. But for some weird reason cats are copyrighted and letters are not. There are many ways to draw the same letter, as there are many ways to draw a cat. Also if one draws letters that look like cats, will they fall under copyright protection?

If someone draws a cat, and the next person draws basically the same cat, there is no copyright infringement.

You need something "extra", some kind of style that is distinct.

I'm not saying your drawing has no copyright - it does, if someone reproduces it exactly that's illegal. I'm saying if someone makes the same type of drawing, in the same style, that's not infringement - even if they looked at yours, as long as they drew it themselves.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#289

Post by dredmorbius »

Animats wrote: post #241
dredmorbius wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a matter of US law: - Font letterforms are not copyrightable. (Eltra Corp. v. Ringer, 579 F.2d 294 (4th Cir. 1978) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eltra_Corp._v._Ringer >) - Font programmes are. (Generally 1980 Computer Software Copyright Act.) - Cleanroom reimplementation of software is not copyright infringement. An AI without access to original source code would likely pass this test. - As a further twist, it app…

Right. A good question to work on is whether an LLM, given a reasonable number of characters of a font, can generate letter forms for the entire Unicode character space. Probably. It's a style matching problem, and LLMs are good at that.

That would be interesting to see. An a possible way of extending current typefaces through the Unicode glyph-space.

Thought I'd had earlier: there's a lot of detail that goes into font design, particularly anticipating issues with specific media.

E.g., faces meant for wet-ink print often incorporates features to avoid pooling or smearing ink ("ink traps", see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ink_trap>). Electrostatic printing (a/k/a laserprinters), and screen-based displays (CRT, LED, Plasma, eInk) also have idiosyncrasies which fine-detail font design may take into account.

I'm not sure those would be hugely significant, but seem a domain in which a naive AI font designer might prove deficient.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#290

Post by nine_k »

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.

No, not a ceiling, but rather less baroque terms of use / price structure, I'd say. It's like licensing software per CPU core, and / or with a separate license with separate conditions for every of the two dozen components of software. These have been ridiculed because people who end up working with that get bothered and want to vent. Should not be a moral crusade though; a crusade to "liberate" someone else's property, as opposed to creating and maintaining something free, has a different name.
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