Someone should sue FACT for copyright infringement – and refuse to settle.
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...
Edit: Back in the mid-90s versions of Corel Draw came with a Truetype editor. A friend of mine made "knock off" versions of fonts they liked from magazines, etc, and made them freely available on his ISP-provided web space. They drew them by hand, using printed samples as the inspiration.
Over the years they got some angry messages from a few "type people" who didn't like that they'd made freely available knock-offs of various fonts. (I remember that "Keedy Sans" is one they knocked-off and got a particularly angry email about.)
Further aside: My fiend made a sans serif typeface that has a distinct pattern of "erosion" at the edges and voids within the letters. It's easy to tell when it's the font he made. For the last 30 years I've kept samples of the various places I've seen it used, both on the Internet and on physical articles. I find it so amazing that a TTF file made by a kid in Corel Draw in 1994 or 1995 ended up being used in advertisements, on packaging, etc.
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.
You can't copy the font files themselves, but you can make visually indistinguishable new fonts with the same shapes because the shapes are not protected by copyright.
Additionally though, some fonts have design patents, which does protect the shape. Unlike copyright which has absolutely crazy expiration (like 150 years occasionally?) these patents only cover 15 to 20 years or shorter if abandoned.
An example of Apple patenting a font valid 2017 to 2032: https://patents.google.com/patent/USD786338S1/en
It seems like it was just a hobbyist project to recreate the look of the font from the anti-piracy ads? Which is 100% legal.
Edit: OK, so the original font appears to be "FF Confidential"? Why didn't the post even mention that? So maybe it is a digital clone, which would be illegal. But then strange that there aren't any DMCA takedowns of it on major font sites?
1. Catapult Entertainment made/commissioned XBAND Rough as a clone of Confidential for their use somewhere (promotional materials, PC software, who knows?). The font file contains the text "Copyright 1996 Catapult Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved".
2. The "You wouldn't steal a car" campaign pirated Catapult's copyrighted font file. I think they got away with it because Catapult was no longer in business at that point. They were acquired by Mpath Interactive in 1996 and Mpath's IP got acquired by GameSpy in 2000.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti... and forward
T-Mobile trademarked a very specific pink, "Magenta"
There’s even a company that holds trademarks on a set of colors, Pantone.
Courts have yet to reverse or revoke these silly trademarks.
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 knockoffs.
I can't tell which way you mean this, but that sounds similar to the situation with most public domain musical compositions - the manuscripts may be completely open but a specific typesetting can still under copyright. And like that case, "just" tracing a font / typesetting a composition is still a fair amount of work.
The "sweat of the brow" argument is not valid in the US.
This person isn't just collecting existing letter shapes; inventing a new letter shapes would be protected by copyright?
https://open.spotify.com/track/65zwPZvsUCU55IpyWddFsK?si=bBf...
I was under the impression that fonts are just a collection of line arc/points.
So is this a probabilistic comparison in that, if all of the line arc/points match another font - the chances are high it was ripped?
> went sleuthing and quickly found a PDF from the campaign site with the font embedded
So, the PDF had the font Xband Rough embedded inside of it.
As a result, in one of the modes of PDF you can save the entire font file for every font used by the PDF into the PDF itself, just in case it's not present on the recipient's machine. Costly? 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?
So in this case, the author grabbed a copy of a PDF version of the ad (because those ads are still available online), cracked open the document itself, and found the glyphs for the letters are sourced from a version of the font that was intentionally created to steal someone else's font work because the whole font file is in the document.
Assuming it's for print/display and not future editing, I imagine you could convert the font strokes to vectors or similar.
... 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 format and the file format for most popular fonts. So they were heavily incentivized to just reuse code they already owned here instead of reinventing a wheel).
Air quotes - “it’s obviously the fault of the person who cloned the font and the general public needs to be protected against such content” - end air quotes.
At the same time, it doesn’t have to be productive, it’s funny enough.
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.
It is quickly turning into one of these things that there are laws for, and everyone thinks it is rediculous, it is never enforced and DE facto not a law.
And what a shame that is.
This is why copyright is shot-through with exceptions (for example, we give broad leeway to infringement for educational purposes, for what benefit does society gain if protection of the intellectual property of this generation stunts the growth of creative faculties of the next?). And that's usually fine, until, say, a broadly-exceptioned process to gather and catalog art and expression worldwide available online that was fed into neural net training in academic settings for decades becomes something of a different moral quality when the only thing that's changed is instead of a grey-bearded professor overseeing the machine it's a grey-templed billionaire financier.
(I submit to the Grand Council of People Reading This Thread the possibility that one resolution to this apparent paradox is to consider that the actual moral stance is "It's not fair that someone might starve after working hard on a product of the mind while others benefit from their hard work," and that perhaps copyright is simply not the best tool to address that moral concern).
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.
I get that an average computer user who just views content might not. But as soon as you start creating stuff and even searching for and downloading a font you like I'd think some kind of mental bell would ring like "oh, these are a thing. Like some type of commodity."
If you're a professional using them in your work, that's an entirely different story, and you are significantly more likely to appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into making them.
(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.
shrug I guess these folks never sold something they made completely by themselves maybe.
Not saying font designers shouldn't get paid, but they mostly aren't making things "completely by themselves", they are mostly making derivative works from things that exist, without any consideration for the original authors.
https://usgraphics.com/static/products/TX-02/datasheet/TX-02...
Ignoring that they likely didn’t make it completely by themselves (standing on the shoulders of giants and such), it’s quite possible that those people don’t believe that a file should cost money. I’ve made a few things as close to “completely by myself” as possible and given them away for free, and those were physical objects - I lose it when I give it away! I have absolutely no problem giving away 1s and 0s for free, I can make as many copies of the original as I want with no additional effort.
Of course we don’t live in a world where everyone can follow their passions without needing money in return for sharing the result with the world, so it’s fully understandable people want to sell their art. It’s disingenuous and reductive to assume that anyone who doesn’t want to pay for art has never made anything completely by themselves, though.
But I'm not sharing my copy with anyone else. This isn't insulin or something. They'll be just fine without it.
Link for the lazy https://neil.computer/notes/berkeley-mono-font-variant-popul...
A well made font, from an artistic perspective, is a thing of beauty-- particularly when it incorporates subtle visual themes and nuances. It's definitely more than just "drawing the alphabet". There are also metric ass-tons of glyphs necessary to make a usable font.
Likewise, a properly hinted digital font file, especially with little touches like ligatures, is also a thing of utilitarian beauty. It's a ton of work to get that right.
That the shapes of fonts can't be protected by copyright isn't a new idea. Anybody who makes a font today should know that going in. I wouldn't make a font with the expectation of getting paid outside of doing it for a specific commission. Doing it "for the love" and expecting to get paid seems like a losing business proposition.
Except most of the creative part was done 100 years ago and companies are now trying to protect the fact that they digitized something that has existed for a century or longer.
To clarify: the original font is named "FF Confidential" (which the post doesn't even mention).
The seemingly illegal clone is called "XBAND Rough".
URL with %s in place of query: https://www.google.com/search?q=intitle%3A%22index.of%22+(tt...
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 the SEGA Genesis/MegaDrive and Super Nintendo/Super Famicom.) Seems silly, however there is at least one source that seems to corroborate this idea, crediting the font to Catapult Entertainment, the company behind the XBAND:
https://fontz.ch/browse/designer/catapultentertainmen
Of course, this could've just been someone else guessing; I can't really find any solid sources for the origin of this font.
Wow! I should've thought to check that.
> 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?
My guess was going to be that it was used in marketing copy, but that doesn't explain how it wound up distributed apparently freely. The idea that it is related to the PC XBAND service seems likely to me, though. The dates line up, based on this press release:
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 will cost you 50 times more - for a single year.
I guess these font sellers imagine there’s still some app boom - a Klondike rush with developers bathing in dollars. Maybe if their licenses were more realistic, piracy would be less of a problem.
Do you have a citation for that?
Printing a book costs just about nothing, it’s astonishingly cheap to print a quality book in volume. Author royalties are not that high (I suppose famous authors whose name alone sell books is another story), then you have retail margins and overhead.
The top three book publishers’ have sales in the low billions with operating margins in the 10 - 20% range.
It is a healthy industry even if it is smaller than it used to be.
The one problem with books is that shipping an individual book to a single consumer costs a far more than printing the book, but there is zero shipping and zero printing costs for ebooks, just the retailer margin.
And as for the authors, most would make a lot more money tutoring for the same number of hours of effort they put into the book. Those appearance fees might make it better, but how many people get those?
A few spots for folks interested in some amount of numbers:
https://slate.com/culture/2024/04/book-sales-publishing-indu...
Ouch!
What is wrong with me then?
Font licensing feels like God tier product marketing.
So it's de facto "free unlimited trial, free for personal use, pay for business if you have a soul and shame"
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 but I wouldn't try my luck with any non-free fonts made by Russian designers.
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 cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer.
Your meal doesn’t deeply suffer, it’s just a bit bland.
Branding requires being distinctive, mixing novel visual and other aspects in a pleasing way.
As far as I have been able to tell no major platform ships with the universal font of fonts (full coverage of all possible fonts with 4.5Mb seed) “AnyStyleYouWant” font.
And none of the fonts they do ship have the “distinctive” feature.
Until that day comes…
Even trained wine tasters can't tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine reliably.
Normal people can't even tell what flavor of skittle they are eating without the visual color cue.
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!), but any engineer would make the case why that's not true at all.
Programming language choice has an aesthetic side, but it is also very much a functional concern. Can I write secure code? Will it be performant? Will it be maintainable?
Different languages represent different functional tradeoffs. Are fonts really the same kind of thing? IOW, how would you make a choice between using Arial vs. Helvetica?
But just because those two typefaces are quite similar (and the reason to pick between them is largely financial/convenience) doesn't mean you'd never want to have more fine-grained control over the text you're working with.
You mentioned security. When I'm editing this comment, 0 and O are very different (the zero has a slash through it), however when I hit save they look quite similar. (But because we're all using system fonts on HN, it might be different for you). While it's often just a stylistic choice, in many situations the two characters would be indistinguishable and that would be an issue, which is why someone might choose a typeface where characters are significantly different. Think a password you have to transcribe.
If you know your font will be used in a quite small size, you may want one that is optimized for being read at tiny sizes. If you're displaying something technical, a monowidth font is better suited.
And all of this focused on utility for the most part; I'm leaving out all the reasons you'd want it for stylistic reasons. If you're trying to make people feel at ease, you may want typeface where the end of the strokes are rounded, for example. Sometimes you want people to feel a certain way, in the same way you modulate your tone when talking.
But to go down that path from a logical standpoint... Papyrus isn't on my computer (OSX) for whatever reason, and it doesn't come on Linux. Papyrus isn't a free, public font... it's licensed by its owner (ITC), so the only reason you can use it on your computer is because someone is paying a license for you to see it.
What computer are you buying that only has one font? There are dozens of fonts, covering all kinds of styles, on every desktop sold.
Additionally, very few system fonts include all the weights. Fonts aren't just come in a single weight. The font you use for a giant page-filling title is generally skinnier than the font used for a caption.
Good design creates a reaction, such as causing you to buy something or interacting more with something or whatever, even for people that say they don't care about design.
Designers know you better than you know yourself.
An obviously false statement which you can't possibly back up.
> Would you use Arial instead of Helvetica Neue? I certainly wouldn't. Put two posters side-by-side and you'd notice the Helvetica one as looking more professional, even without any design background.
First of all that's just completely your own subjective opinion. Second, there are many other free sans-serif fonts out there to choose from (examples[1]).
> Good design creates a reaction, such as causing you to buy something or interacting more with something or whatever
'Design' can encompass many things, but can you show me some data that backs up your claim that slight differences in fonts will make a difference in product quality/performance/revenue/etc? Because I have seen a loooot of data that says it's almost always completely irrelevant.
[1] https://fonts.google.com/?categoryFilters=Sans+Serif:%2FSans...
You're making absurd comparisons and not being sincere.
Yes, most people are fine choosing from the fonts available on their computer when writing a document.
But that's not what me nor OP are talking about. We're talking about shipping software (like a mobile app), or publishing a blog post. In that case, the best you can specify is either a very common font (Helvetica, etc), or a high-level classification (serif, sans-serif, etc).
There are many free fonts out there, yes, but there's a reason they're free. The quality for a majority of them is significantly lower, and many designs come with constraints (either utilitarian or stylistic). You don't have to agree, but I'm not being absurd or lacking sincerity.
You're also just going around and commenting the same thing on each of my posts. But don't limit your understand to just my writing here; there's thousands of books about the importance of typography if you're curious to learn more.
Go on and tell me what that reason is then. Are you also going to tell me free open-source software, like Linux is low-quality because its free?
> The quality for a majority of them is significantly lower
Again, a completely baseless, unprovable assertion.
> You don't have to agree, but I'm not being absurd or lacking sincerity.
What do you call your example of using Calibri for everything in response to someone suggesting the use of free fonts?
You are lacking sincerity and making absurd claims. Almost everything else you say is literally baseless rhetoric that you are unable to back up with data or any objective argument.
> there's thousands of books about the importance of typography if you're curious to learn more.
It's amazing that you apparently know of thousands of such books, but are unable to make one coherent, objective argument to back up your claims.... did you read them?
> '..freely available and/or system supported fonts.'
Not just 'system supported fonts' (whatever that means), and not just Calibri. That's why your 'use Calibri for everything' example is absurd and does not at all address the point they made.
The "problem" with free typefaces isn't their quality, it's their ubiquity. Since everyone can use them, they are used everywhere. Licensing something less common can help your product stand out from the crowd.
Frankly, non-default fonts outside of the logo are a red flag to me. They signal a team that has put form so far over function that the function is almost guaranteed to not be fit for purpose.
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 difference matters, then you can likely afford the sticker price.
All I have done is defend the importance of typography, and never mentioned piracy or stealing.
This to me is like the Menswear Guy on Twitter, who will explain in very great detail to you why the Hermès product is significantly better than the generic alternative. He's right, but he also understands that you buy the Hermès product to make a statement. Spend money on that statement if you want --- I do --- but don't try to pretend you have a right to it.
(i don't mean i own any hermes products; just stupidly expensive typefaces)
I think we're responding to different things. You're upset the original person mentioned piracy, whereas I took their rant to be more about licensing changes being yet another way companies are creeping up prices from one-time-purchase to rent-forever. And moreso, I'm annoyed by most of the comments saying that the free fonts on your computer should be enough.
It's also no wonder that people will happily buy these generics even when they're not white-box reverse-engineered phenotype reproductions via independent breeding, but carefully bred-true genetic descendants of the proprietary original cultivar (a.k.a. "seed piracy" — the thing Monsanto goes to extreme lengths to stop people from doing with their GMO wheat.)
Almost every font, style, pattern, component used in any new app today has already been designed, implemented, redesigned and reimplemented 20 times over. 'The importance of design' and all of the associated rhetorical BS only really serve to keep redundant (imo) designers employed.
> like complaining about high-end ingredients when a supermarket has cheap stuff. Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer.
Can you actually make an objective argument for why certain fonts are more high-quality than existing free/open fonts, or how free/open fonts will make a product deeply suffer? I'd wager you can't.
I've worked closely with many designers behind some very popular 'nice' award-winning apps. I've listened to endless rhetorical BS about how 'this specific element of the design is incredibly important and any deviation is a major hit to the product quality'. These same designers very very rarely even notice when an incorrect font/color, styling/layout is used, while arguing that any such deviation will ruin customer trust destroy the app. Complete BS.
I think a lot of the anger is more about the complexity and price discrimination than the absolute price.
But the prices are off the charts, and it's the usual private-equity buying up the competition & their IP and then squeezing as much as they can. Not sure why that's worth rooting for.
1. Public Domain Fonts
2. Fonts that cost money
The set of public domain fonts is pretty small and most of them are low quality - not all, thankfully - and out of the ones that don't suck a lot of them only support the latin character set.
As for fonts that cost money, just to give you one example, I recently asked a foundry what it would cost to license a font for my indie game. Their quote was $1100/yr with a ceiling of 300k copies sold (so I'd need to come back and pay them more on a yearly basis and the cost would go up if I was successful). This was only for 3 variants - regular, italic and medium - and only for the latin character set. For one typeface.
Certainly if I was throwing around millions of dollars I could pay that without blinking, but it's far out of reach for independent developers (and they know I'm independent)
Lots of games distribute "baked fonts", where the ttf/otf is statically rendered into a bunch of texture atlases and they ship the atlases instead of the font. Many font licenses I've seen don't permit this kind of use, so I suspect a lot of games are actually in violation of their font licenses, if they paid to license their fonts at all.
Hell, just the other day I prepared a PowerPoint presentation for work using one of the stock Office fonts and then I opened it in Office on another machine and the font was missing...
Also, just for anyone cruising the comments before reading the story, it is more about the "You wouldn't steal a car" PSA's from >20-ish years ago. I don't recall there being any explicit advocacy for font licensing anywhere in it.
Anti-pirating ad music stolen [2013]: https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/01/29/3678851.h...
> This is so typical of people who are just doing a hatchet job for money but have no personal interest in the topic or skin in the game.
This is both true and incomplete. Advocates against piracy are time and again caught infringing on IP. I think about when Lily Allen stole the content of her anti-piracy screed "It's Not Alright" from Techdirt[0]:
> However, [...] the rest of the blog post – put there by Lilly herself – is someone else’s work. Arrr mateys, Long John Allen lifted the entire post from another site – Techdirt.com – effectively pirating the work of the one and only Mike Masnick.
> “I think it’s wonderful that Lilly Allen found so much value in our Techdirt post that she decided to copy — or should I say ‘pirate’? — the entire post,” Mike told TorrentFreak on hearing the shocking news.
The anti-piracy creators demand that we stay within their narrow definition of "piracy", which just so happens to exclude the work that they steal. Yes, the creative agency behind the "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" ad are disconnected from the cause. And their clients at the MPAA and FACT do not consider fonts to be worthy of the protections that are ostensibly the basis of their existence.
0: https://torrentfreak.com/file-sharing-heroine-lilly-allen-is...
You wouldn't download a car
>https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/piracy-its-a-crime
Also be aware that some people actually consider the real PSA to be a Mandela effect since they consider "You wouldn't download a car" to be the "real, original" text of these PSAs, while in reality this was a popular parody/meme that was made out of the PSA:
> https://www.reddit.com/r/MandelaEffect/comments/113qibd/you_...
Used to waste time and money with foundry stuff until Google Fonts caught up. Now I typically source something from there unless it's essential to the design.
Remember kids: information wants to be free!
Now, every single font in the font folio is free with a $30./month Adobe sub.
That's an interesting definition of "free," but it's relevant that the subscription doesn't grant a perpetual license.
This sounds very critical, but I assure you, these are my people. I rather find it very reassuring, even a little charming.
Don't ever change HN.
Oh, and tell it to fix the kerning.
Its a good gimmick if you can get it.
dporter•3h ago
hyperbovine•3h ago
pixl97•2h ago
There is a significant portion of the internet that is perfectly fine with copying every bit of digital data and using it as their own.