371–380 of 421 posts
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>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.
All law is a fiction, by that argument.
sure but some can claim more of a moral basis than others.
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A high price in a font won't sink a business as a high price in truffle would for a Michelin chef... The price of a font for a business is extremely negligible... Or again you shouldn't buy it if your business is too small. And if it's that small you should be able to justify the value added by buying that font as truffle does for the chef. So we are back at what OP said.
Well the analogy falls apart because (among many, many other reasons) the people eating at Michelin rated restaurants, especially 3-star, are completely insensitive to the price. It will cost whatever it costs and there will still be a long wait to get a table, if you even can. So rather than pretending we're talking about truffles, let's just talk about fonts directly without strained analogies. Fonts, which the maj…
At the end of the day if people don't see the difference and the value between a free and a priced one, then they don't need to steal and can just use the free ones. There are plenty of amazing free fonts anyway some being the actual roots of many paying ones, and the gold standards.
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>Sure! But what else are you going to do if your document uses a super-special font for displaying mathematical symbols or sanskrit or the glyphs of a language understood by fifty people on the planet and Unicode isn't widely adopted yet, having been invented just two years before PDF? Assuming it's for print/display and not future editing, I imagine you could convert the font strokes to vectors or similar.
You could. But in a thousand page document, that's a lot of memory used up to record a vector for every letter 'c'. So of course you do two layers: record modifiers and transforms on a canonical 'c', and then keep a canonical 'c' somewhere with all the other letters. ... But you already have that data structure: it's the font file itself. (Possibly worth noting here also is that historically, Adobe owned both the PDF…
only if you do things in the dumbest way possible.
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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"
Sure, but with fonts you have basically one level between the font they are 'developing' and the one they are copying from. There is work involved, but very little of it is creative work.
I never entered in a contract with you, producer of goods or innovation, you have no right to forbid me from copying anything.
You may prevent your own customers from facilitating access of non paying customers to their goods (by making them sign a contract) and even persecute them in a civil court (for breach of contract).
The fact that governments allow copyright owners to censor information on the internet to protect their commercial interest is just absolutely insane and incredibly damaging to the freedom of circulation of culture and ideas.
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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.
Part of the problem is that Monotype has a bit of a monopoly in the upper segment of the market though right? I know they're not the only players, but it feels like they've vacuumed up enough small, successful foundries that they now control enough of the market that they can get away with the kind of aggressive behavior that wouldn't be tenable in a healthier, more competitive marketplace. From Wikipedia [0] > Via a…
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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..…
The organization in question is a UK organization, and you can in fact copyright a font in the UK. The US is unrelated to this issue.
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TrueType, which has been around since the 80s, includes a full Turing-complete instruction set for hinting: https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-Reference-Manual/...
This is sophistry. Does anyone write apps in ttf? Can I download a calendar app? Has anyone even cranked out some proof of concept? Fonts aren't software in any meaningful sense of the word.
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…
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You can trace it, I guess...
What if you convert it to bitmap, instead of shipping a TTF/WOFF/etc? Does it still counts as shipping the font... or not?