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You wouldn't steal a font

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Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#51

Post by wyager »

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 These crazy outdated licenses that let you print as many magazines or books you want forever, for a one-time price.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 haven't bought a ton of fonts, but iirc the licensing from US Graphics was pretty reasonable for software distribution. It was something like an extra $200 for app usage for an indie developer.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#52

Post by nickff »

giordanol wrote: post #44
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 These crazy outdated licenses that let you print as many magazines or books you want forever, for a one-time price.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…

font licensing feels like it never caught up with how software actually gets made now. charging more for app use than for mass print always seemed backwards, especially when indie devs are scraping by and a font costs more than your backend. no wonder people end up using “free alternatives” without looking too hard at where they came from.

I am of the opinion that the licenses for fonts in software are too expensive, but why is the pricing ‘backwards’? Book publishers don’t make a lot of profit, while software developers do.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#53

Post by Lerc »

jll29 wrote: post #19

What saddens me is that a lot of people are so ignorant that they don't even realize a font is something that takes creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort to design.

I think it is perhaps important to realise that while what you say is true, that is not what is protected by copyright. As others have said in these comments, if the font had been copied using the digital data then it may be a copyright infringement, but if the duplicate font had been constructed from scratch to be a visually identical font then it may not be a copyright infringement.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#54

Post by knuckleheadsmif »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #9
datadrivenangel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..…

But you can Copyright the Name of a font. But yes long standing rule says you can copyright how letters & numbers look. Note that if you make a font that contains your own “artwork’ that does not represent a letter or number you can get protection for that.

And only fairly recently (in the past 30 years—I forget when Adobe won this court case) the courts ruled you can protect the code for generating a fonts look from being copied.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#55

Post by ndiddy »

jchw wrote: post #22

I don't know if this actually counts as copyright infringement, since typeface shapes are not eligible for copyright in the U.S. (disclaimer: IANAL) so depending on how it was cloned, it might be legal. The more amusing detail, to me, is whether or not XBAND Rough is related to the XBAND peripheral for video game consoles in the 90s. (Fascinating story, it was an add-on that enabled multiplayer over a phoneline on th…

It is related. The font file contains the text "Copyright 1996 Catapult Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved". I'm not sure where it comes from because the SNES/Genesis/Saturn versions of the service didn't use it. Maybe it comes from the short-lived PC XBAND service?

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#56

Post by haneefmubarak »

phkahler wrote: post #29
wildzzz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even harder to get away with pirating fonts now with web fonts. Either the service can detect you pulling a font for a domain that isn't paying for it or webcrawlers will find unpaid fonts.

>> Either the service can detect you pulling a font for a domain that isn't paying for it... Is that really a thing? Markup in a web page tells how to display the text. Saying "use this font over here on this other server" seems fair game on some level. Might not be on another level, but it's technically the end user downloading a file that's publicly available on some server.

AIUI the font vendor has a list of customers, each of whom are required to provide an exact list of the domains they will host it on and the domains they will display it on. So the crawlers, upon identifying a matching font, simply have to check that both the displaying and hosting domains match.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#57

Post by homebrewer »

cyberpunk wrote: post #27
jll29 wrote: post #19

What saddens me is that a lot of people are so ignorant that they don't even realize a font is something that takes creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort to design.

I remember trying to explain to some colleagues why I paid about 100 bucks for the font I use and why I wouldn’t share it with them and they just couldn’t get it. (It’s Berkeley mono). I don’t even know how many glyphs it is (it’s thousands) but for something I’m looking at for 6-8 hours a day, every single day and is the absolute peak of perfection (at least to me), 100 bucks seems like a fucking bargain to me. shru…

The "peak of perfection" does not support even just European languages, not having full coverage even for Latin scripts. But it's a "love letter for the golden age of computing", and the golden age had massive problems with scripts for languages other than English, so maybe it's intentional.

https://usgraphics.com/static/products/TX-02/datasheet/TX-02...

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#58

Post by weinzierl »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #9
datadrivenangel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..…

In the 90s Corel Draw came with a Helvetica named Swiss. Microsoft wasn't as bold and called theirs Arial.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#59

Post by alabastervlog »

shadowgovt wrote: post #47
mrkeen wrote: post #28

They stole the music too. Anti-pirating ad music stolen [2013]: https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/01/29/3678851.h...

If one didn't know better, one could conclude the history of this ad campaign suggests it was performance art done by creatives ideologically opposed to the client.

I'm sure these artist-loving folks just paid the very cheapest ad/video agency they could find to make this that seemed capable of completing the project, and that agency was the kind of place that does sloppy stuff like that (many do, haha).

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#60

Post by taneliv »

charcircuit wrote: post #6
azalemeth wrote: post #4

That 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.

Maybe not in the US, but fonts do enjoy copyright protection in at least some European markets.[1] I frequently encountered this campaign on DVDs for rent in the local Blockbuster equivalents, so I don't think it is entirely theoretical infringement, either.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti... and forward

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