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These crazy outdated licenses that let you print as many magazines or books you want forever, for a one-time price.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 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.
tptacek 1 hours ago [-]
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.
gkoberger 57 minutes ago [-]
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 cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer.
wubrr 1 minutes ago [-]
> misunderstanding the importance of design
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.
lolinder 15 minutes ago [-]
Even under this analogy you're complaining about the price of luxury goods and saying that it's no wonder people shoplift to steal the truffles because they're so darn expensive.
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.
gkoberger 4 minutes ago [-]
No, I'm saying a Michelin chef can complain about a 50x increase in the cost of truffles without negating the fact that a lot of people happily survive on ramen.
Aeolun 44 minutes ago [-]
Modern included fonts aren’t that bad. It’s more like using tomato sauce instead of fancy handmade chilli.
Your meal doesn’t deeply suffer, it’s just a bit bland.
Nevermark 17 minutes ago [-]
Branding is very important.
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…
hattmall 16 minutes ago [-]
And importantly... Just like with food, the overwhelming majority of people will not notice at all.
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.
fmbb 44 minutes ago [-]
There are roughly zero apps out there that would ”deeply suffer” from having to use freely available and/or system supported fonts.
gkoberger 38 minutes ago [-]
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!), but any engineer would make the case why that's not true at all.
jeremyjh 15 minutes ago [-]
>You think games would feel as immersive if everything was Calibri?
What computer are you buying that only has one font? There are dozens of fonts, covering all kinds of styles, on every desktop sold.
nogridbag 25 minutes ago [-]
Avatar was pretty immersive! And they just did Select-All and chose Papyrus!
gkoberger 20 minutes ago [-]
They updated it for the sequel, and one example doesn't nullify thousands of years of design.
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.
shermantanktop 26 minutes ago [-]
I admire your passion, but... as someone who is not deeply interested in fonts, I view them in largely functional terms. Can I read it? Does it look ok?
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?
gkoberger 11 minutes ago [-]
Arial v Helvetica isn't the best example, because Arial was designed basically as a cost-efficient alternative to Helvetica (here we are yet again at licensing)! They were designed to be metrically compatible... meaning, the character widths and spaces are exactly the same. This means that switching to Arial won't affect the layout of your document. This was more important when things were more analog, but it's still important with digital documents: for example, it could mess up the number of pages, which would affect meta content or create line breaks that seem meaningful but aren't. Additionally, having things like a widow (a word by itself on a new line) can disrupt the visual flow and draw focus to or away from content in ways you don't desire.
You mentioned security. If you look at this, 0 and O are (for me at least) very different... the zero has a slash through it. In other fonts, they're the same. While it's a stylistic choice often, in many situations the two characters would be indistinguishable, which is why someone might choose a typeface where characters are significantly different. For other uses, the slash in the 0 might become a distraction or signify the wrong thing.
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 trying to make people feel at ease, you may want typeface where the end of the strokes are rounded. If you're displaying something technical, a monowidth font is right.
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. Sometimes you want people to feel a certain way, in the same way you modulate your tone when talking.
IncreasePosts 13 minutes ago [-]
Is your point weakened by the fact that there is not one freely available font to use commercially, but literally thousands?
gkoberger 8 minutes ago [-]
I guess it comes down to how you view the concept of "the medium is the message". Should the tone be set by the creator of the software / writer of the blog post / etc, or should the end user choose one typeface for everything (or have fine-grained control over everything they read and view?)
bigiain 18 minutes ago [-]
So "Typefaces are incredibly important", just not important enough to pay for (or create yourself)???
gkoberger 2 minutes ago [-]
The OP didn't say they didn't want to pay, they're saying there's been a shift toward per-impression pricing which is often unsustainable for even the most lucrative apps.
babypuncher 28 minutes ago [-]
My problem with this analogy is that there are dozens if not hundreds of free typefaces that are exceptionally high quality and have stood the test of time.
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.
AlchemistCamp 27 minutes ago [-]
Hermes doesn't forbid you from wearing your watch or charge 10x more for you to wear it while playing a mobile game.
I think a lot of the anger is more about the complexity and price discrimination than the absolute price.
luckylion 4 minutes ago [-]
Do you consider fonts largely useless, overpriced and primarily directed at customers who seek to display status symbols? Because that's the analogy, I'm sure I agree.
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.
nativeit 42 minutes ago [-]
This maybe isn't relevant to your point, but the story in question is from long before mobile apps.
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.
zeroq 2 hours ago [-]
And god forbid you to accidently ship the font with your game or mobile app! :)
grishka 1 hours ago [-]
How does one even use a font in an app without shipping it with the app? In a logo or something?
tecleandor 49 minutes ago [-]
You can trace it, I guess...
al_borland 60 minutes ago [-]
I've only purchased one font, which I use in my editor and terminal, so I don't have to worry much about the license. I can't be bothered to use custom fonts for any projects. With all the licensing considerations it just makes me cut out the whole idea to simplify my life.
pier25 41 minutes ago [-]
I only purchase fonts for graphic design projects (mostly branding). For UIs I'm perfectly happy with Google Fonts.
3 hours ago [-]
2 hours ago [-]
refulgentis 2 hours ago [-]
In general, AFAIK, the general assumption is every font is absurdly easy to steal, and that you'll do so before purchasing it.
So it's de facto "free unlimited trial, free for personal use, pay for business if you have a soul and shame"
grishka 1 hours ago [-]
Depends on the country.
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.
jsheard 2 hours ago [-]
I would suggest not pushing your luck with webfonts though, because in that case you are distributing the actual copyrighted "code" of the font, not just the minimally protected shapes that it outputs. There are services which crawl the web actively looking for pirated webfonts on behalf of foundries (and their lawyers).
0cf8612b2e1e 32 minutes ago [-]
How robust is that identification? Does it just look for file hashes or identical character shapes? I imagine it is trivial to repackage a font file to break the hash fingerprint.
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.
SubiculumCode 2 hours ago [-]
A diffusion model for fonts. Isn't it time they get ripped off too? /SARCASM
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.
nickff 2 hours ago [-]
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.
teruakohatu 2 hours ago [-]
> Book publishers don’t make a lot of profit, while software developers do.
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.
indrora 38 minutes ago [-]
Short answer: Nobody fucking knows because the accounting is more non-GAAP than your typical investment fraud house.
A few spots for folks interested in some amount of numbers:
Book publishing is at least as bad as VC work. You publish a lot of books to have a catalog, and a few books make inordinately more money than the rest which keeps the lights on. New printings sound cheap enough, but a lot of books don’t get many of those. The long tail is very flat.
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?
worik 2 hours ago [-]
> while software developers do.
Ouch!
What is wrong with me then?
gorgoiler 2 hours ago [-]
Whatever the answer, I would caution you to listen carefully to the most product / marketing centric person who dares speak up.
Font licensing feels like God tier product marketing.
azalemeth 3 hours ago [-]
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.
charcircuit 3 hours ago [-]
You can't copyright a font.
WillAdams 3 hours ago [-]
A typeface design, in the U.S., no, but the digital font file comprising outline data and instructions, according to current U.S. law, for an overview of current case law and a proposal see:
There's no evidence XBAND Rough was extracted from a digital source bit-for-bit, unless someone can point to any?
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?
ndiddy 3 hours ago [-]
In this case it seems like what happened was:
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.
If I were going to knock it off I'd duplicate the splotching exactly, too. I'd prepare as sample as a bitmap, use any of the various raster-to-vector tracers on it to get an SVG, clean up the SVG of any conversion artifacts, then make it into a type format. (Heck, there's probably a fun problem in here to train an algorithm to do the cleanup and conversion. You could probably knock-off the hinting and ligatures, too.)
selkin 3 hours ago [-]
XBAND Rough could not have been inspired by those ads, as the OP shows the ads are using XBAND, and not FF Confidential, the original tyepface it cloned.
pessimizer 1 hours ago [-]
If it were the same file, it wouldn't be a "knock-off." It would be something like Optifonts. Very frowned upon, but definitely not illegal. Also, the kerning is usually trash, there will be way too many nodes in the vectors, and things may be missing. Annoying to work with, but in the case of Optifonts, free (because they're long out of business.)
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.
FACT/FAST are a UK organisation, where font copyright is espressly enumerated in the copyright law.
xyst 15 minutes ago [-]
You can copyright just about anything as long as you have the _money_
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.
datadrivenangel 3 hours ago [-]
They absolutely are copyrighted and big money.
EvanAnderson 3 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
weinzierl 2 hours ago [-]
In the 90s Corel Draw came with a Helvetica named Swiss. Microsoft wasn't as bold and called theirs Arial.
knuckleheadsmif 2 hours ago [-]
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.
colechristensen 3 hours ago [-]
You can, entirely legally, make a copy of any font and distribute it freely.
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.
> 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 knockoffs.
spookie 2 hours ago [-]
Well they're programs tbf
rafram 54 minutes ago [-]
They are computer programs. Not sure why you’d crudely insult the judge for saying that.
codedokode 2 hours ago [-]
Is this fair? It actually takes a lot of work (I assume) to design letter's shapes. Of course, not counting those who just trace 16-th century font without paying a compensation.
amgutier 2 hours ago [-]
> Of course, not counting those who just trace 16-th century font without paying a compensation
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.
ars 2 hours ago [-]
> takes a lot of work
The "sweat of the brow" argument is not valid in the US.
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.
alabastervlog 2 hours ago [-]
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).
rglover 1 hours ago [-]
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 until Google Fonts caught up. Now I typically source something from there unless it's essential to the design.
jll29 3 hours ago [-]
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.
cyberpunk 3 hours ago [-]
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.
shrug I guess these folks never sold something they made completely by themselves maybe.
Suppafly 2 hours ago [-]
>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.
kccqzy 2 hours ago [-]
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?
Suppafly 1 hours ago [-]
So you understand the issue, it's derivative works all the way down.
homebrewer 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Hey, Berkeley Mono supports most Western European languages, can you tell me what's missing? I can add it. Btw, the tagline is about the aesthetics. :)
testing1235 2 hours ago [-]
Hi Neil, I'm not that person you replied to but in my projects I require Cyrillic glyphs for Russian and Ukrainian texts. Also when checking out your website just now, I wasn't able to add a Berkeley Mono App License module in your ordering system. I assume I need a App License to embed the font in my app? But I also can't seem to find any information about the app license itself on your site as well.
neilpanchal 1 hours ago [-]
Cyrillic is not supported so Berkeley Mono might not be suitable for your application. Are you building a Web app (Webfonts) or a Desktop/Mobile app (App license)? Please email me.
jmwilson 1 hours ago [-]
The lack of the ohm symbol Ω is also quite a bummer given the technical domain of the font.
neilpanchal 1 hours ago [-]
Agree, I need to work on the full greek glyphset.
EvanAnderson 1 hours ago [-]
Is it a mistake, on page 4 of the linked datasheet, that "SemiBold" is shown for two different weights? I can't help but think that something like "DemiBold" was what the lighter weight was supposed to be labeled.
neilpanchal 1 hours ago [-]
Yes, that's a typo. Need to redo the entire datasheet and possibly find a way to automate it using reportlab or some other PDF library. Right now, it is in InDesign and it is a pain to keep updating it.
tiagod 28 minutes ago [-]
I've been using Typst to generate PDF reports and it's pretty nice.
wyager 2 hours ago [-]
What percentage of monospace text on the internet uses random obscure glyphs? This isn't really a practical problem.
> shrug I guess these folks never sold something they made completely by themselves maybe
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.
kstrauser 1 hours ago [-]
Same for me, same font, same logic. The author put a lot of hands-on work into making something I stare at all day long. I even just bought a license for a friend for his birthday because I love it.
But I'm not sharing my copy with anyone else. This isn't insulin or something. They'll be just fine without it.
3 hours ago [-]
shadowgovt 2 hours ago [-]
Never really considered it, but taking a quick glance: yes, I'd pay $100 for that too, especially as my main font for programming interface.
EvanAnderson 3 hours ago [-]
I've made a couple of fonts. Very bad ones. I know firsthand they absolutely take creativity and tradecraft.
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.
Suppafly 3 hours ago [-]
>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.
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.
codedokode 2 hours ago [-]
Not every font is digitized from old samples.
Suppafly 1 hours ago [-]
They are still mostly derivative works in basically every sense.
Fraterkes 25 minutes ago [-]
Confidently asserted obvious falsehood
AlexandrB 3 hours ago [-]
It's not about ignorance. There are so many things you interact with every day that take "creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort" that it's impossible to be aware of the details of each one. At some point you just have to abstract that stuff away and go on with your day.
temporallobe 1 hours ago [-]
No kidding. As part of a mapping project I worked on, I created a set of 200+ custom SVG icons. I used Inkscape and hand-drew most of the shapes or modified existing glyphs from icon fonts or other raw vector graphic sources. This took months of work and planning, and I even figured out how to use Inkscape’s batch scripting API to automate some things. It was one of the most tedious things I’ve worked on and I am very proud of it. And as far as I know, it’s still in use today by the customer.
Lerc 2 hours ago [-]
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.
phkahler 3 hours ago [-]
>> 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 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."
RussianCow 3 hours ago [-]
The problem is that there are so many free fonts that most people take them for granted. And honestly, I don't blame most folks for thinking that way because there isn't a good reason for the average person to pay for a font. If you're just making wedding invites or signage for an event or some other one-off thing, you probably don't care.
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.
jchw 3 hours ago [-]
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 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:
Of course, this could've just been someone else guessing; I can't really find any solid sources for the origin of this font.
ndiddy 2 hours ago [-]
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?
jchw 2 hours ago [-]
> It is related. The font file contains the text "Copyright 1996 Catapult Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved".
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:
Very early in my design education (late 90's) I was taught that fonts are fonts and the more you have, the better you tool set would be. As a graphic designer I definitely made things with fonts I had downloaded. It wasn't till I got my first serious design job at an agency where I quickly learned about purchasing and licensing fonts. Even if I could "find" a missing font, I wasn't allowed to use it. We needed to get the fonts directly from the vendor we were working with and if they were being too slow, we ate the cost and purchased the font.
wildzzz 3 hours ago [-]
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.
phkahler 3 hours ago [-]
>> 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.
haneefmubarak 2 hours ago [-]
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.
alabastervlog 2 hours ago [-]
"Pulling a font for a domain"—wtf, isn't the client making the request? Why detect anything, just require a referrer on your allow-list, and deny if it's not there.
nativeit 21 minutes ago [-]
This comment section is precisely what I expected upon discovering this very funny anecdote regarding the irony and hypocrisy involved with the infamous anti-piracy advocacy of the late '90's/early '00s. Peak HN--didactic, humorless, and lost in its own takes about the absolute least relevant detail of the story: font licensing.
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.
gred 7 minutes ago [-]
I'm also enjoying the conversation, but IMO font licensing is core to whether or not there is actual irony and hypocrisy at play (specifically the copyright aspect, and whether or not the font clone actually infringed copyright).
nla 30 minutes ago [-]
Bought the Adobe Font Folio -- TWICE.
Now, every single font in the font folio is free with a $30./month Adobe sub.
nativeit 28 minutes ago [-]
> ...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.
dporter 3 hours ago [-]
I would, and I have.
hyperbovine 3 hours ago [-]
It's fresh takes like this that keep me coming back to HN, year after year.
pixl97 1 hours ago [-]
I mean how many articles do we have a week where the AI vendors are copying the entire internet and using it for training.
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.
nobleach 3 hours ago [-]
Having worked in the graphic design industry during the 90's, no. There's no way I'd have just slipped a font I didn't own on a disk and sent it off to a printer. When it comes to fonts for coding... sure there was that ONE time I snagged Operator Mono for an extended "trial". I still believe in paying for things that I use on a daily basis, so I switched back to Sauce Code Pro or something.
Can someone explain to me how you determine if a font is ripped/stolen?
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?
lynndotpy 3 hours ago [-]
In this case, per the link:
> 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.
shadowgovt 3 hours ago [-]
PDF is a famously (and hilariously) wild document format because it satisfied the need of being able to recreate a work piece faithfully using thousands of kinds of outputs, some of which didn't even exist when the document was created, to ideally arbitrary pixel resolution (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbCniw-BcW0 for a delightful and informative talk including this topic).
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.
Suppafly 2 hours ago [-]
>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.
tossandthrow 3 hours ago [-]
The moral background for copyright is in free fall these days.
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.
samspot 3 hours ago [-]
Copyright, and patents, are not based on moral principles. It's a temporary government license meant to encourage innovation and hustle. Whether it works or not, I don't know. But the only question of morality is if it's immoral to break an arbitrary law, or not.
themusicgod1 2 hours ago [-]
Copyright has always been based on moral principles. 'Moral rights' have been part of copyright longer than "encourage innovation and hustle" has been something the government has considered worth promoting. The original copyright laws were about controlling who could print the bible, and the statute of anne was about encouraging learning while controlling what booksellers could and couldn't do. Copyright if anything was about preventing innovation from the very beginning, and slowing the hustle of culture down so that incumbents could edge out newcomers - a drama that has played out generation after generation
Suppafly 2 hours ago [-]
>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.
shadowgovt 3 hours ago [-]
It's worth noting that the moral background (at least in terms of political philosophy in the US) was always rooted in practicalities. The Constitution even includes the qualifier "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." The moment a protection works against those goals, it's on shaky ground. And that ground is always in flux; there's a reason Thomas Jefferson noted regarding patents that "other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrasment than advantage to society."
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).
williamguerra 3 hours ago [-]
here is a font stealing search query if anyone is interested. I used to have it as a custom search engine on chrome:
I don’t think that’s productive. Best case response that I can imagine is piracy opponents pushing for some legislation mandating fonts with DRM.
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.
anonym29 1 hours ago [-]
"Entity that conducts IP theft whines about IP theft"... just like OpenAI whining about Deepseek distillation...
Remember kids: information wants to be free!
albedoa 3 hours ago [-]
I am not registered with this private instance, but there is a comment that I want to reply to:
> 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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What computer are you buying that only has one font? There are dozens of fonts, covering all kinds of styles, on every desktop sold.
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.
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?
You mentioned security. If you look at this, 0 and O are (for me at least) very different... the zero has a slash through it. In other fonts, they're the same. While it's a stylistic choice often, in many situations the two characters would be indistinguishable, which is why someone might choose a typeface where characters are significantly different. For other uses, the slash in the 0 might become a distraction or signify the wrong thing.
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 trying to make people feel at ease, you may want typeface where the end of the strokes are rounded. If you're displaying something technical, a monowidth font is right.
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. Sometimes you want people to feel a certain way, in the same way you modulate your tone when talking.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A few spots for folks interested in some amount of numbers:
https://slate.com/culture/2024/04/book-sales-publishing-indu...
https://archive.is/nGY6D
https://janefriedman.com/book-pl/
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?
Ouch!
What is wrong with me then?
Font licensing feels like God tier product marketing.
Someone should sue FACT for copyright infringement – and refuse to settle.
https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/chtlj/vol10/iss1/5/
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.
http://abfonts.freehostia.com/opti/
https://luc.devroye.org/fonts-27506.html
[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.
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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow
Anti-pirating ad music stolen [2013]: https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/01/29/3678851.h...
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.
(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...
Link for the lazy https://neil.computer/notes/berkeley-mono-font-variant-popul...
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.
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.
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.
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:
http://www.gamezero.com/team-0/whats_new/past/xband-pc.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Wouldn%27t_Steal_a_Car
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
URL with %s in place of query: https://www.google.com/search?q=intitle%3A%22index.of%22+(tt...
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.
Remember kids: information wants to be free!
> 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...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg
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_...
To clarify: the original font is named "FF Confidential" (which the post doesn't even mention).
The seemingly illegal clone is called "XBAND Rough".