Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

You wouldn't steal a font

fedi.rib.gay

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 421 posts

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#291

Post by gjohnhazel »

efitz wrote: post #285

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…

You inspired me to attempt this and sadly GPT, Claude, and Gemini all said they didn’t have the software tools to do it. But as you mentioned, it can generate SVGs and those can be used to create a font.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#292

Post by Kiro »

tossandthrow wrote: post #280
Suppafly wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And what a shame that is. I was with you until this. Copyright is a legal fiction, if it's no longer working the world will adapt. No need for shame to be involved.

Copyright in the sense of corporate greed is indeed an issue. Whenever talk about that being a shame, I am thinking about the individual author who lost control over their work and still can not feed themselves.

Piracy is not the reason individual authors cannot feed themselves.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#293

Post by mchusma »

Copyright for most (if not all) fonts seems like something that just shouldn’t work. We want things in the public domain, like Shakespeare, and we want derivative works protected. Fonts are tiny differences on public domain work that 90% of people can’t tell. You wouldn’t want Disney to claim every pencil stroke difference on Mikey’s to be subject to different copyright terms, it would become a kind of perpetual copyright strategy. If there are true technical improvements to the way we represent letters, they should be covered by patents, with their shorter terms.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#294

Post by jrflowers »

gkoberger wrote: post #116
fmbb wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are roughly zero apps out there that would ”deeply suffer” from having to use freely available and/or system supported fonts.

That's not true at all. You think games would feel as immersive if everything was Calibri? Magazine-style articles would feel as tactile if they all used the same system fonts? Etc. You may not care about fonts, but to say they don't matter is a misunderstanding. For example, I could glibly say we only need one programming language (the user doesn't care what syntax you used before it was compiled down to 1s and 0s!)…

>That's not true at all.

What specific iOS apps would suffer greatly by having to use the ~75 font families that come with the device? How would they suffer exactly?

https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/List_of_fonts_included_with...

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#295

Post by echoangle »

rafram wrote: post #110
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> was itself arguably a copyright-infringing knock-off. In US law, there is no such thing. The shape of a glyph (or many) isn't even slightly copyrightable. This is settled law. Fonts (on computers) have a special status that makes them semi-copyrightable in that some jackass judge from the 1980s called them "computer programs" and so they have the same protection as software... but this won't protect against knockof…

They are computer programs. Not sure why you’d crudely insult the judge for saying that.

Are fonts really programs? Is a digital image file also a program?

A font file is more like a config that’s used by your OS to render something, there’s no real interactivity in fonts (except some ligatures but those are just static tables, right?).

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#296

Post by Fraterkes »

unclad5968 wrote: post #153
Fraterkes wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Confidently asserted obvious falsehood

It's not obvious to me. Could you explain what makes fonts non-derivative?

In what way are fonts derivative that doesn't apply to everything else that is created?

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#297

Post by jzacharia »

Suppafly wrote: post #99
kccqzy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you suppose they should do to the original authors? Perhaps the original author is Claude Garamond who died in the sixteenth century? Or the unknown workers who carved the inscription at Trajan's column in the second century AD?

So you understand the issue, it's derivative works all the way down.

at a high enough level of abstraction, all creative work is derivative. wouldn't call it an "issue"

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#298

Post by dwaite »

tptacek wrote: post #235
rondini wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ve been combative throughout this thread, and it's clear that you don’t see typography or design as disciplines that warrant serious thought. I don't think you're actually willing to engage with an explanation of why it matters but I'll try anyway. System fonts are the absolute bottom of the barrel. Some are well designed but using any of them is a visual shorthand that you didn't care enough to put thought into…

This claim that system fonts are the "bottom of the barrel" is just so clearly false that I don't understand how you can be an advocate of typography and say it. Both Microsoft and Apple put huge amounts of effort into typography, contract or employ well-regarded designers, and their outputs are themselves well-regarded. If you wanted to say "most of what's on Google Fonts is bottom of the barrel", you'd have a color…

San Francisco is a great font. Arial is a perfectly functional semi-clone of Helvetica, Times New Roman is a decent interpretation of Plantin. Roboto is an interesting mash-up of Helvetica, DIN, and a few others.

System font from a web standpoint means you get one of these depending on the user's choice of phone, desktop, and/or browser.

It is somewhat like buying art because the frame covers a blemish on the wall. That the print inside the frame might be of a famous impressionist painting does not mean that the frame or the print necessarily go with the room.

The car analogy involves a car rental place - that they may give you any one of several newish, functional and even stylish vehicles does not change that you may often wind up being paired with a vehicle mismatched for your function.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#299

Post by porker »

williamscales wrote: post #234
socalgal2 wrote: post #182

TIL: font designs are not copyrightable in the USA. Font files are but the design itself is not. It seems you are free to copy the design, but not the file. Not sure how that plays out in practice. Is it common to copy a font design or is it just more common to be inspired by a font design but make a new font that's in the same general design space? Like say Arial seems inspired by Helvetica but is not the same.

There are definitely fonts that are nearly identical copies, e.g. Palladio is a clone of Palatino ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatino#Free_and_open-source_... )

Looking forward to someone doing the same for Gill Sans and most of the Monotype catalog now that they've switched to annual licensing for webfonts (pay once use forever is gone)

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#300

Post by djfivyvusn »

echoangle wrote: post #295
rafram wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are computer programs. Not sure why you’d crudely insult the judge for saying that.

Are fonts really programs? Is a digital image file also a program? A font file is more like a config that’s used by your OS to render something, there’s no real interactivity in fonts (except some ligatures but those are just static tables, right?).

Yes. And they're also copyrightable.

That's why this shit is so stupid.

Post reply on HN