Fun to think about, have personally gone down this rabbit hole before, but I'd be surprised if this was permitted by courts.
> The key point here is that the shape of the glyphs themselves, for example, non-trademarked text posted on advertisements or products with printed text, are not copyrightable. So long as you’re not stealing the creative work, like the advertisement, itself, the shape of each letter is in the public domain.
There is a jump from this assertion to:
> This got me thinking, as all things do, on whether I could simply scrape the internet for public, non-creative, non-trademarked use of fonts
The missing step here is that the glyphs for a webpage are not embedded in some sort of rendered image or physical medium. They're _rendered from the copyrighted font file_ to the browser.
The font file is delivered to the browser and that copyrighted file is used to render the glyphs.
This pipeline might work for creating a font that is "inspired by" the available glyphs rendered in the credits of your favorite film.
But downloading the entire copyrighted font file, generating a character sheet from it and clipping the individual characters from that sheet? I can't imagine how any sensible court system would not consider that a derivative work.
> But downloading the entire copyrighted font file, generating a character sheet from it and clipping the individual characters from that sheet
That's not what this project is doing. It's extracting the characters from already published pictures, without touching the original font files at all.
I believe he's downloading png files from Meta, converting them to SVG, then creating the glyphs. I'm not sure what the law is on this, but there's no need for the font files to ever be on your computer. E.g., https://render.myfonts.net/fonts/font_rend.php?id=a6719376b9...
Yeah this is similar to how facts are not copyrightable, but data is. You can't just extract rows out of a data file one-by-one, into a variable named "just_a_fact", put it back into a new file and pretend that you didn't derive it from the original.
Courts are not dumb. Trying to scale up a technicality to circumvent the law usually does not fly.
If this were a legal issue it can be gotten around the same way the IBM BIOS copyright was circumvented: with a clean room reimplementation. Team A renders the text with the copyrighted font files; Team B, otherwise not in contact with Team A, scrapes Team A's text images, vectorizes them, and imports them into FontForge.
Yeah, you're using the Internet as Team A in the author's example. You're looking for images of fonts. The people that made those images bought a license to use the font to make images, so it's fine if they share them with you.
None of that guarantees you'll be free from legal concerns, of course. Maybe the original image author didn't have a license. Maybe the licensor thinks they can change the terms of the contract at will. You'll probably be caught in the middle of all of this.
My take is that the biggest problem you'll find is naming your free fonts. Someone probably owns the word "Helvetica", so you'll have to call it something else. Someone looking for a font will then not find yours, and will buy a Helvetica license.
Back in the day (Windows 3.x era) I used to use cheap lookalike fonts from shareware compilation disks/CDs. So there was like a Palatino clone called "Palamino", a Cooper Black clone called "Cookie", an Optima clone called "Proxima", etc.
You can still find fonts like this on font sites all over the web.
The Atari ST used to come with a font named "Swiss". It was basically Helvetica and was named that because "Helvetica" is Latin for "Swiss" (as in "Confoederatio helvetica").
It may be considered a derivative work, but that doesn’t matter if it’s a derivative of only the portion of the original work (the glyph shapes) that cannot be copyrighted as a matter of law.
It still seems so relatively trivial to automate this -- just render every character on a <canvas> at a fixed known font size at super-high resolution and autotrace outlines, and render every character pair to figure out kerning, and the common ligatures. The only major thing missing is hinting, but that's irrelevant for printed material and not very important on retina screens -- and auto-hinting gets you more than halfway there on non-retina. (And then there are all sorts of special font features like nonstandard ligatures, which can either be more carefully replicated, or just ignored.)
I'm not saying it would be a good/ethical thing to do this (I personally want designers to be supported) -- but I am kind of amazed that the market for digital fonts still exists, when in theory you can produce a perfectly legal copy and not pay a thing.
>but I am kind of amazed that the market for digital fonts still exists, when in theory you can produce a perfectly legal copy and not pay a thing.
There is a growing trend for style guides to use typefaces from no-cost or open libraries. This isn't limited to small companies either, I can think of a handful of industry heavyweights in tech, food and medicine who each have taken up this approach. This forms the first reason not to dupe fonts, because there's plenty of good ones already available for no cost.
I've found that companies that do this have an easier time of staying on brand since it's so simple to obtain the necessary fonts.
As for seeking out deliberate copies of popular fonts, there's a few reasons why an agency wouldn't want to propose this:
1. It's easier to sell in a well loved font, with a proven character from a foundry with heritage. Imagine talking to a board of suits, they're often looking for the safe option.
2. It's kind of a dick move for an agency to be ripping off the foundries, especially small modern ones. Creatives do enjoy what typographers make and can see the love put into their craft.
3. Typographers are not faceless. Modern font designers are still alive and active on socials, you might personally know who you are ripping off.
4. There's a bit of hypocrisy in hating on frankenfonts such as Arial, while deliberately seeking out dupes.
5. It's trivial to open a font in a font editor and resave it with different specs, if a creative wants to be sneaky they can just do this themselves anyway.
6. Adobe have also thrown their hat into this ring by offering a range of popular fonts available for use for no extra cost with their creative cloud subscription. It's not needed to seek out a dupe-font, when the real thing is available with a few clicks.
> It's kind of a dick move for an agency to be ripping off the foundries, especially small modern ones. Creatives do enjoy what typographers make and can see the love put into their craft.
But foundries sometimes do the same: they take samples of, say, 18th century font, and digitize it, and claim copyright. Do you think it is fair when someone copies Helvetica or 19th century Bookman [1] ?
I don't feel your example is comparable here, but I'm interested in hearing maybe a different one that conveys your ideas better.
The reason for my thinking is that I don't see the problem in a foundry today building a font from a typeface that is neither commercially available, nor under any protection (or potentially even ownership). To me this is not comparable to dodging licensing fees from another foundry that is licensing a font. I actually feel that this foundry would be doing the design world a service by ensuring that pre-computing typefaces are adapted for modern use. Factually this process occurs frequently without controversy.
As for claiming copyright: There is a significant amount of non-trivial work involved into building such a font, including a number of creative decisions that the typographer will need to make to address shortcomings as well as fleshing out the wealth of missing characters that are commonplace in contemporary publishing.
Type from the 18th century or earlier (pre film/digital) is imperfect. Not every 12 pt 'm' slug in that font drawer is identical, and not every imprint from the same 'm' slug in that book is identical. It is a lot of work to create digital versions of these metal/wood typefaces.
This segues beautifully into a longer discussion about visual acuity testing charts.
It's relevant because even today many VA charts still feature the historical numbering systems which are deeply inconsistent from eye chart to eye chart. (The reason why this fault is of no concern is because in modern use, they are only stated to infer a vague acuity.)
Historical revivals are hardly the same thing. They often end up far from the original, and require a ton of work. It isn't just a matter of digitization. And they "claim copyright" on their derived work, not the original. With fonts they really just copyright the name.
Requiring a ton of work doesn't really matter one way or the other for copyright. Mowing the lawn is a ton of work. Doing the work doesn't let you prevent other people from mowing their lawn to the same height as yours.
Additional information on this point: "Sweat of the brow" [1] is a doctrine which grants copyright on a work due to the time and effort the author put into making it. The US Supreme Court rejected this doctrine, meaning that only the creative aspects of a work are relevant to copyright. For that reason, in the US, a phone book is not copyrightable unless the arrangement of its contents is creative [2].
The EU narrowly rejects "sweat of the brow" copyright for recreations of public domain visual art [1]. I have no idea whether the same applies to font faces, public domain non-visual art, or phone books, but I'm assuming that it doesn't.
That work I was referring to is a creative, artistic process of designing a font based on a historical starting point. That does matter. Hardly mowing the lawn or compiling a phone book.
Your approach would result in impossibly large binary font sizes unless a really good (smart) engine was present and utilized to separate the hinting logic from the underlying symbols. Then again, with most fonts these days putting in zero manual hinting work and just relying on the default font engine heuristics, it might not.
>most type foundries protect their fonts by copyrighting the font files themselves
Copyright is applied at the point of creation of a work, so unless they're in jurisdictions with no copyright law then they all acquire copyright on their font files.
>Since you’re entering into a legal agreement with the type foundry themselves, they can put whatever limits on how you can use the font, regardless of local copyright law.
You can't normally disclaim obligations or rights provided by law unless explicitly allowed to do so. For example, in most jurisdictions you can make copies to aid creation of a tool for blind people (cf Marrakesh Treaty), so copying to feed into an ML algorithm to improve a text(image)-to-speech tool may be allowed even if the company put in their terms "no unauthorised storage on a computing system or in a database".
An interesting example of this is attempting to put work "into the public domain" depending on jurisdiction you might not be able to do that before the copyright expires 'naturally'.
these are my opinions only and do not relate to my employment
>Copyright is applied at the point of creation of a work, so unless they're in jurisdictions with no copyright law then they all acquire copyright on their font files.
Yes, but in the United States, copyright registration is a prerequisite for copyright litigation.
According to 17 U. S. C. §411(a), “no civil action for infringement of the copyright in any United States work shall be instituted until . . . registration of the copyright claim has been made in accordance with this title.”
The Supreme Court addressed this head-on in Fourth Estate v. Wall Street.
Assuming your summation to be true, then that is really interesting as it breaks USA's obligations under the Berne Convention (which they didn't join until about 100 years after most of the West) which was the reason registration was ended as a requirement (but was still useful due to, AIUI, pecuniary damages being awarded for registered works whilst only actual damages are/were? awarded for unregistered).
I think you have erred, the question before the court concerned when registration bites. My understanding is 17 USC 106 still applies, but civil actions before the court require a registration to have been initiated; I thought that was just a filter on court actions?
> Suppose you publish an article that happens to contain a sentence identical to one from this article, like "The law sees Colour." That's just four words, all of them common, and it might well occur by random chance. Maybe you were thinking about similar ideas to mine and happened to put the words together in a similar way. If so, fine. But maybe you wrote "your" article by cutting and pasting from "mine" - in that case, the words have the Colour that obligates you to follow quotation procedures and worry about "derivative work" status under copyright law and so on. Exactly the same words - represented on a computer by the same bits - can vary in Colour and have differing consequences. When you use those words without quotation marks, either you're an author or a plagiarist depending on where you got them, even though they are the same words. It matters where the bits came from.
I waded into this territory recently when trying to find a font that I can re-distribute as a system font for a device i'm building. Apparently this is completely restricted and disallowed according to pretty much every commercial license i've read from a long list of font shop sites.
Instead, the intended use as spelled out in their commercial licenses boils down to the font buyer using it only to render graphics for printing or some other artistic use, rather than a "mechanical" use such as mine.
Even after contacting some of them, they're unwilling to budge.
After reading your post, I suspect one issue may be that some (many?) of the fonts sold on these sites are already pirated, and the site wants to protect itself from the only real copyright/legal threat of redistribution of the digital file.
I've also found that many font authors don't even intend their fonts to be used as system/pc fonts. But rather something that can be imported into Adobe Illustrator (or the like) for further design work for print and graphic images - many of the font files themselves typically only contain A-Za-z letters (sometimes only capitals!), sometimes not even numbers, and only a few common punctuation characters.
Sounds quite a lot like "They're just PNGs on the Internet. Why would you pay for that when you can just copy it for free?"
The article is interesting from a technical point of view but feels yucky from a fairness point of view, regardless of legality. I may not have a ton of respect for the large corporation that owns the copyright on the file, but I do have respect for the creatives who make fonts (and other things) for a living.
TFA's author is arguing that it seems to be possible to do this, but as a font-author he finds it disreputable (you have to read to the end). He's arguing, I think, that fonts only became copyrightable when font files came along, with the arrival of PCs with GUIs. And that what became copyrightable was a font file.
He argues that this is a weird anomaly; and I agree. But I draw a different conclusion; the introduction of copyright on font files was seriously annoying to me at the dawn of the PC age, because fonts were among the first digital objects that were copyrightable (that I had access to). With the exception of fonts, I could copy and re-purpose anything I found. I suspect fonts may have been the battering ram that led to the present situation of copyright maximalism.
I don't mean to talk down the effort, judgement and skill that goes into creating a typeface; but I've never had much time for maximalists. I'd go back to author's lifetime, and I wouldn't allow immortal "persons" (corporations) to have copyrights.
Considering the amount of work it takes to build a font – the amount of mind-numbing care, testing, iterating, crafting... please do not steal fonts. There's no big bad studios or MPAA between these typographers and the world taking the bulk of their money, and they barely scrape by as it is.
Pirate all the lame movies you want, but please, if nothing else, pay typographers and buy direct from their foundries.
If any brave souls are interested in legally pirating all existing fonts and being taken there, I think you’d likely be doing a service to society here in challenging this.
The service to society is already being done by the typographers. The service you can do to society is to pay them for their passion, precision, and care.
The author agrees with you. They're saying that the lack of legal protection for fonts is a problem, and that creating an opportunity to challenge that law would be a good thing.
Courts can only weigh in on legal issues when people bring a dispute before the court. In this case, if someone did what the author describes it would trigger a lawsuit from typographers, which would give the court a chance to (re)interpret or overturn the existing law.
The question is, essentially, "should bitmap fonts be copyrightable". In many jurisdictions, they are not. In the US, this has been black-letter law for several decades. A purely mechanical image reproduction of a typeface does not enjoy legal protection. I think it should remain that way. Many fonts are extremely similar, and allowing rights to the design itself would result in fights over the most basic of typeface design, similar to that seen in the music industry (where there have been efforts to claim rights to a chord progression).
Outline fonts (that contain programmable elements) are considered software and are copyrightable. A rendered output of such a font is not. It may legally matter who makes that rendered output, that they have the right to use the font software in that fashion. But someone working from a specimen? They should have the right to digitize that font themselves, and employ creative decision-making in placing the control points. In fact, that very thing has happened numerous times within the typography industry.
I think the vast majority of typefaces can’t really have legal protection from a creative stand point because they’re so close to each other that it’s incredibly hard to argue that they’re original content.
Just compare Inter vs Roboto vs San Francisco. Are they different? Technically yes. Are they different enough to allow for all three to be granted legal protection? I’d say no. And if you say yes, then it comes down to how different is different enough and the entire field becomes a legal nightmare
No. The given the author's background, this is (admittedly) clever technical thinking done under the guise of making a legal/political statement. Plenty of other ways to solve this problem besides fake 'good intentions' slacktivism.
> Pirate all the lame movies you want, but please, if nothing else, pay typographers and buy direct from their foundries.
I agree in spirit, but as I wrote on my blog months ago, I just refuse to engage with an industry that had decided to adopt some of the worst licenses possible to sell their products.
Until foundries start adopting sensible licenses for webfonts I’ll just refuse to give money to them.
What have you done to fix it besides not stealing fonts and writing a blog?
You're using slacktivism as cover for bad behavior. I'm not saying that IP laws aren't f'd up and wrong. They absolutely are.
But two wrongs don't make a right, and it's the same nonsense that folks have been making since the beginning of the internet to justify what amounts to petty theft.
I'd never steal a font considering there are countless free, open source alternatives out there. But I also refuse to pay an insane amount of money to type foundries because they decided that "page views" are a reasonable indicator of how much value I'm getting for a typeface.
I worked on websites where the cost of a license for the font was 70% of the total budget available for the entire project. That makes no sense to me. I love great typography. I love great typefaces. But a typeface is not all that important in the grand scheme of things. I can change a typeface on literally every single one of the hundreds of websites I worked on in my career and I bet 95% of the users would not notice it nor care cabout it.
We are all colletively getting pissed super quickly when software goes subscription but we're fine when someone is selling me a typeface that comes with 50000 page views and once those are "used" I have to pay again. For a goddamn file I self host myself.
> [..] creative work that deserves to be copyrighted
As I've grown older I've become less and less convinced that any of our current legal frameworks actually protect the output of "creatives".
Instead, it seems that those with the deepest pockets - <cough> looking at you, Disney(!) - have, over the decades, moulded the system to fit their own purposes, leaving most actual creatives high and dry.
When I read sentences including both "Abigail Disney" and "philanthropist" it makes me want to vomit.
> Instead, it seems that those with the deepest pockets - <cough> looking at you, Disney(!)
I think this is mostly a case of survivorship bias. You only read about copyright in the news when it's related to giant well-known corporations or egregious abuse of the law.
The bread and butter uses of copyright benefit millions of authors and artists every day but you never hear about it in the news.
For example, I wrote and self-published two books. While you can read them for free on the web, I still retain the copyright and sell physical copies. Fairly often, someone will rip a copy of the book and try to publish their own (poorly executed) eBooks or print versions. Copyright is what lets me have those taken down.
The trade-off is that a lot of poor people will never hear about your book, or only read a substandard version of it. I've seen official torrents from the owners of the copyright, simply for quality control purposes.
> The trade-off is that a lot of poor people will never hear about your book
There is always a trade-off between accessibility and compensation in creative works. I think the value of copyright is that it gives the author of the work—the one who has the most skin in the game—some agency in picking a point in that trade-off. (For example, I chose to allow anyone to read the books for free on the web, which maximizes accessibility for those who can't afford it, while selling print and eBook copies which enables me to be compensated by those who can.)
You can argue that copyright prevents poor people from accessing works. But that argument presumes a world where the work already exists. Without some ability to reliably predict and control compensation, there are many works that would simply never be made.
You may then argue that if someone really has that creative drive, then they'll make it even without compensation. But that means that only those with independent means will have the luxury of being creative. And the last thing I want to do is put even more cultural control in the hands of the rich.
I agree. Your monetization is kindly, and that deserves respect. The opportunity to create would never be there for many, and the skills involved never refined for many more, if compensation was impossible. You enforce against poorly formatted copies of your work. Derivative creations of your work that might not be transformative enough, but aren't intended to copy your work directly, might not trigger your enforcement? Systems like youtube's contentID are how most people notice copyright enforcement, if I had to guess. Your point on survivorship bias is interesting to think about.
> Derivative creations of your work that might not be transformative enough, but aren't intended to copy your work directly, might not trigger your enforcement?
This is a tricky balancing act and has come into play for me with translations. There are several translations of both of my books, but they have all been done using real publishers with real contracts and stuff.
I've had a number of people volunteer to do community-driven free translations but so far have declined.
Part of being a publicly visible creative person is that my name and identity have a certain reputation attached to them, and that reputation has real value for me both emotionally (it feels good to know people think I'm cool) and economically (a lot of people bought my second book simply because I wrote it). Transformative works that are still explicitly and visibly derived from me run some risk of dilluting or weakening that reputation. (Of course, there is also the chance they can elevate it.) Imagine if, say, a Portuguese fan translation of one of my books has some racial slurs inserted it and now everyone in Portugal thinks of me as "racist author Bob Nystrom".
Since I only have one real identity on this planet, I tend to be cautious about allowing other creative people to visibly build on it, even when they do so with good intentions. Much of this is probably just because I'm a perfectionist.
On the other hand, there is some stuff I've been happy to see: many people have translated the code in the book to other programming languages, and several have done video series' about the book.
> The trade-off is that a lot of poor people will never hear about your book
Is this meant to be bad for poor people or for me, as a creator?
If for poor people - all of the information required to live a relatively good live is available on the internet, free of charge. The vast majority of copyrighted content is entertainment. Nobody is entitled to entertainment.
If for me - I'm ok with that. If someone else isn't - they can reduce the price of their work, self-publish, or release the work (or even an excerpted section of it) as public domain/creative commons.
> I've seen official torrents from the owners of the copyright, simply for quality control purposes.
...which is extremely rare, and not really relevant to the discussion.
You're on a throwaway, so correct me if I am wrong, but this is your first comment in this discussion? How is it irrelevant enough for you to insist such a thing? Distributing in such a way that illegitimate copies disappear but your margins are affected as if the piracy were there all the same is useful to think about in this discussion, because it has happened and you can study it somewhat.
To your point on copyright, unaffordable things aren't always entertainment, though it would be nice if that were the case. Feeling that the majority of content is frivolous entertainment is just a feeling; a feel-good feeling that trivializes any drawbacks to the copyright system.
At least in the US, you're free to reject copyright and publish your book as public domain if you want more poor people to be able to read it. Most authors just like copyright law and requiring payment for their works though.
This summarizes a bunch of fashion lawsuits including, someone selling NFTs of someone else's handbags, Adidas suing someone making track pants with Adidas-style vertical stripes (which seems like a trademark violation but Adidas lost), Staging a fashion show that blocked someone else's store, one brand buying a lot of stock in another brand, The Hell's Angels suing someone for using their logo, someone getting fired for being an anti-semite, and a couple of counterfeit shoe law suits.
Zero of these even suggest that fashion designers may claim that the shape and style of a dress or other garment that they create is their intellectual property and they have a monopoly on its duplication. Because you can not copyright a dress.
If you have more links, it is your turn to read them first.
The second link about about a print, not the dress itself. Kind of like if someone was selling a dress with Barbie on it. The dress isn't copyrighted, but Barbie imagery is and you need a license to use it.
The second is the only interesting and halfway relevant link you have provided. It says Versace was suing another company for ripping off their designs, on the bases of trademark law, it being a trade dress and copyright law.
They would have had grounds on copyright law, but this company didn't just copy one dress it was copying all of their dresses and designs. In any event it wasn't settled because they settled out of court, which means nothing changed, and still to date you can't copyright a dress.
1. US copyright law prohibits "useful articles", like clothing, from being copyrighted.
2. However, as that article points out, "decorative features of a uniform should be treated like two-dimensional artwork". Look at the example on that article - it's basically some abstract stripes and triangles that were seen as deserving of copyright protection, much less than a sweatshirt with a pink "Barbie" logo in recognized font on it.
3. Beyond copyright, you can get a design patent on articles of clothing. Christian Louboutin is famous for their red soled shoes as well as their "spike" sneakers, and they're suing other companies making red-soled shoes and sneakers with spikes on them. We'll see how far they get.
In any case, my original point in posting this and the other examples is that the first comment I was replying to, at least to me anyway, was implying that the fashion industry has thrived without the need for IP protections. On the contrary, there are a TON of lawsuits in the fashion industry related to IP protections where one designer is accusing someone else of "ripping off" their designs. The mechanics may not be exactly the same as with written words but the effects are identical.
You can't copyright a dress. You have presented a bunch of articles (that you didn't even read yourself) where artwork associated with a garment such as logos and textile prints may be subject to copyright in certain circumstances. It is not a matter of fashion having the same protections but under different codes. You simply can not copyright a dress. Fashion designers do not have that monopoly of reproduction.
There wasn't really any need for clarification. I and the other poster were just pointing out that you can't copyright a dress. It's as simple as that.
Other types of IP protection are certainly not the same, not are their effects via enforcement.
That last paragraph is self contradictory. If they had grounds on copyright law, then they must have been able to legally copyright their dresses regardless of whether or not they actually went to court. If you can't copyright a dress then they had no grounds under copyright law.
As far as I am aware you can't copyright a dress, unless it is like the banana that got nailed to the wall as art. The most relevant thing would be a design patent.
> If you can't copyright a dress then they had no grounds under copyright law.
Copyright is automatic and they may have just been hoping/assuming it replies. I should have said they may have thought they had grounds under copyright law.
I'm not sure a person making assertions counts as a reference. I only skimmed the transcript but spotted a couple of errors, this person doesn't appear to be an IPR expert?
Also, I don't feel this is going to get anywhere, the space of "nuance of legislation across all jurisdictions in the World" isn't really conducive to casual conversation.
That said, in the UK our caselaw on fashion is almost nonexistent, but the key rulings are well summarised in [0] at page 8. The bar is high but seems attainable. (A summary of Hensher v Restawhile [1]).
An opinion piece at WIPO [2] suggests it's easier to get copyright on garments in USA, they cite some law, at least, but their conclusion on UK law opposes my position (paraphrasing, they say "garments can't be protected").
For a millenia or two (at least), creatives have lived on a spectrum between folk production for small, immediate audiences and commercial production for the aristocracy or markets distribution.
Copyright, since its much more recent introduction, is the tool for commercial creative to keep the folk creatives away from their money.
The upside for media consumers is higher production value and grander spectacle, which is pretty cool. Copyright lets producers pour a lot of money into art and that allows for a different kind of work.
But yeah, it’s pretty brutal for the countless folk creatives who see something inspiring and aren’t allowed to do cool things with it. Copyright does indeed work against them.
Trademarks, patents, and copyrights are only as valuable as your willingness to pay a lawyer to confront those who are infringing.
You can have all of the patents, trademarks, and copyrights in the world, but they're useless unless you defend them. Which costs a lot of money.
I'm not sure what the alternative would be, though. We can't do away with the system completely. Disney needs to be able to earn a profit on content they produce otherwise they won't invest in producing content.
I was just thinking that it might be useful to add up how much money has been made by selling fonts since the dawn of time. I suspect that it's on the order of $1 billion. Adobe probably owns a big share of that, followed by various publishing houses, creative institutes, etc.
But that's about 10 cents per person. Why are we so concerned with protecting the profits of a vanishingly small segment of the population to the detriment of billions of other people?
I think that there are some weak points here that we could collectively attack and dismantle to reduce wealth inequality. One of the screws to turn might be copyright law, at least reducing the term from author's lifetime plus 70 years to something reasonable, perhaps 3-5 years with an option to renew for up to 10 years total. Another would be patent law, and certainly the elimination of all patents around software, genes, etc.
Short of that, we could form guilds where one of the conditions is that seeking IP retribution revokes one's membership. Then only do business with people and organizations in the guilds or face consequences, sort of like what happened with Drew Barrymore when she went around SAG/WGA.
Nah, you can’t earn a billion dollars. Dig the hourly rate for someone working 50 years to hit a billion. It’s just not possible. Nobody actually does that much good or delivers that much value. They just happen to capture or steal it somehow, combination of guile and right-place-right-time. If they “earn” it at all.
It’s an artifact of our system that creates a few kinda capitalist-aristocrats, with about the same (poor) level of justification for the power they wield as feudalism had for dukes and kings and shit. Complete with it often having a hereditary element.
[EDIT] Nb I'm not proposing an alternative, and I'm not sure how we might eliminate that wart on our system without doing more harm than good. But once you break a few tens-of-millions net worth, the rules of our economic system start doing some weird and probably not all that great things, "risk" becomes mostly pretend, and you can "earn" more than most do in a lifetime just being a middleman on access to your capital, and not necessarily a very good one. That reaching these levels isn't super connected to competence or expertise at acting as that sort of middleman—doubly so if it's inherited—makes it all rather inefficient and unfortunate and certainly unfair and even corrosive to democracy (since money converts so well into power), but, it's the system we've got and no, I don't have a better suggestion. But it's surely comparably unjust and evil to rule-by-divine-right and all that, which we're all used to dismissing as plainly silly and bad. A difference of small degree.
> As I've grown older I've become less and less convinced that any of our current legal frameworks actually protect the output of "creatives".
I think most of "creatives" are just high and dry because most of the output is just not very good. Creative output in a digital world is a winner-take-all scenario, so mediocre artists just get 0 exposure.
If I have limited amount of time to commit to watching something or listening to a song or using a font, I will naturally gravitate to things that are already popular/good and make money. What would help creatives here is a better discovery process, but it's pretty tangential to the legal framework.
I think in this case the situation for fonts isn't such a bad compromise. As it is, BigTypeCompany can't go kicking LittleIndieDesigner who can't afford to go to court because their letter-A looks confusingly similar.
Farming the internet for kerning values is going to be a bit of a crapshoot. Many designers don't just type a headline and export to png, often kerning is manually adjusted (especially with headlines, but also during book-type layout kerning may be adjusted on whole blocks of text or just a few words in order to help balance a page or block)
> a project that begged for a better, licensed font
Eh. There are plenty of good fonts with permissive licensees. Also, good typography is much more about sizing and spacing than about picking a better font.
I have fonts installed on my computer that I received from a boxed CorelDraw! Install in probably 1993. These have names like "Swiss721" and were created by Bitstream as visual clones of Helvetica or Times.
Visual cloning of fonts is technically legal and has a long standing tradition. But "While technically not illegal, font designer John Hudson would describe its selling of large numbers of typefaces on CD at discount prices as "one of the worst instances of piracy in the history of type"."
The legal term for the glyphs is "typeface" [1]. Last time I looked at this, it also implied that emoji images that are used in a font, for example Apple's emojis, were potentially not copyrightable either, at least when used as text [2] (and not for example, as a UI element or by themselves on a t-shirt). I recall that at the time, Telegram had completely copied Apple's emoji images into their own font, but I'm not sure if they still do.
I love how he uses the Berkeley Graphics license as an example, yet ignores the fact that you buy their font, Berkeley Mono, because you want a very well engineered font.
Like, there are straight up only two fonts I will say are engineered well, objectively: Berkeley Mono is the #2 on that list, PragmataPro being #1. It isn't about aesthetic quality, its down to how well hinted they are, and how well they render at absurdly small sizes on a wide range of renderers.
Why wouldn't the ligatures show up in images online? Someone's going to screenshot the alternatives at some point - the specimen, if nothing else. (And if they never show up and so can't be traced, then they couldn't've been all that important.)
The next step should be a machine learning system which looks at samples of a font, learns what the font looks like, and then can generate characters in that style it hasn't seen, based on a large training set of other fonts. This would be useful when you want to fill out a font that doesn't have all the characters you need.
if the nocopy flag is set on a font, Chrome will not embed that font into a PDF when you do "print to PDF". instead, the shapes are used to create a type3 font. This is a way the author can get the vector shape of the glyphs without touching the TTF files.
(or that was true back when I worked on that code, two jobs back!)
"Final reminder that I’m not a lawyer and have no clue if anything I said is actually correct, so none of this is legal advice and I strongly recommend you go talk to a lawyer before attempting anything here. I’d also strongly emphasize the importance of supporting the incredible work behind your favorite typefaces by purchasing fonts directly, I definitely do not advocate ever for stealing anyone’s work."
The project is fun and a cool idea, but don't take the headline at face value.
Would something like this hold up in court? My guess is that it probably won't. If a lawyer can demonstrate that you've perfectly recreated a copyright font I'm guessing a fair number of judges or juries would find you in violation of copyright regardless of the method used to make the recreation. Either way you're opening yourself up to a potentially expensive legal headache if discovered.
Yes, you can use that font, but only for print and websites and your website cannot generate more than 100k views monthly and your business annual revenue can be higher than 1m
If you don't pass these we have more licensing options with different numbers and prices.
if you want an app (is WebView in an APK file an app? Is PWA an app?) there is separate price as well
You can host the font file on your server (browser must obviously download it) but you cannot actually distribute it - whatever that means, it could be risky with open source apps for example
This is so bullshit I prefer to always use Google fonts or any other source of 100% free for anything fonts. You don't want my money - sure, your choice
Yeah, even with stock image platforms, having different licenses on every photo becomes a research project if you are working with any great amount of photos. I much prefer it when the websites have a standard license that is applicable to everything on there, because I only have to read it once. Also, if I can't use a resource I paid for in commercial use, it's pretty, but pretty useless.
With stock images there is really only one question, commercial use or editorial use. This distinction is more often about the subject than any decision made by the photographer or platform. Like a photo of any famous person is going to be editorial, unless you get the subject's permission.
The license will be royalty free on even the cheapest microstock services
Webfont pricing is always so weird to me. No one sees a massive spike of traffic on their site and thinks "Oh no! My font license only allows 100K visits a month! Shut it down!".
However, as an art form, typographic design gets the short end of the stick in terms of protection and how people treat their work. There need to be a middle ground right? It's not exactly easy to make a GOOD font, and I'm happy to pay for one if I'm respected in the license.
I like the license Matthew Butterick uses for his fonts. [0] Some things are still a little... odd. (A word file using the font can't be seen by more than 20 people.) But the web font licensing is perfectly fair. (To be used on 3 publicly accessible websites, and embedded using WOFF2 only.)
Plus if you have someone just hanging around who's a font nerd it's fun, saves money, gives you fodder for the marketing machine, and you get a more distinct brand with your company's "handwriting."
It's not actually that hard to make your own font -- like you have to try to make an actively bad font. And since the value-add is mostly character I'm shocked how much people who license fonts jerk you around.
No disagreement, but fonts obey the "even bad pizza is good pizza" rule. Low skill floor, high skill ceiling. And when it comes to fonts you want be a little distinct because they're part of your brand small idiosyncrasies can add to the charm. And unlike commercial font makers it's likely you don't have to worry about supporting more than a few languages, and odds are
good they share most of their alphabet.
I feel bad for people with the notion that there's no such thing as bad pizza. I've had pizza that the cardboard box it came in would be a) more flavorful, b) less tough, c) more nutritional.
The issue is everyone trying to make as much money as possible. And rightfully, they want to charge Time Magazine more than they do some guy with an ezine with 100 readers.
In the age of digital projection, it doesn't really cost the movie studio any more to distribute their movie to a theater than to a home streamer. Yet I think it's clear why they charge the theater more: one is viewing for themselves and perhaps a handful of friends, the other has the intention of distributing a playback to thousands whom they themselves are making money off of. They aren't charging for the actual cost of distribution, they're charging for the intellectual property and the cost it took to make the product in the first place. If the fonts aren't worth what the creators are charging, then the large companies wouldn't be paying for them.
This analogy doesn't really apply to the situation here, because the difference between a personal and commercial license isn't what's at stake. Comparing watching a movie on your own vs making money off of it in theaters is similar to viewing a licensed font on someone's website for free vs buying a font license to use it in your own projects.
A better analogy would be a studio charging a theater belonging to a large chain vastly more money than a small, independent theater. The cost to provide the physical media, promotional material and IP rights to both of them is the same. So the only consideration in play here is that they can pump more money out of the larger business, so that's what they're going to do.
The analogy is just bad altogether. If a theater doesn't show a movie, then they lose out on however many people with $X for the ticket price plus an additional $Y from concession sales. However, Time is not going to lose readers because they choose a font or not. So, the sheer use of the licensed movie has direct affect on the theater's bottom line, yet Time could choose a different font and have negligible notice on their bottom line.
Font foundries thinking they are entitled to a percentage of the bottom line of a company using their fonts is the top of the list of entitled rent seeking bullshit.
To maximise revenue. If you're a font maker, I suspect most are self-employed, you need money. If your font is being used for Time Magazine it is somewhat fair the fee is higher than a guy using it for an ezine for 100 people. One is a company with lots of money and can afford to pay alot of money and the other can't.
> "You can host the font file on your server (browser must obviously download it) but you cannot actually distribute it - whatever that means, it could be risky with open source apps for example"
I ran into this exact issue as well. I can only imagine that there's some obscure legal nuance to this where if the font is loosely accessible then somehow the enduser gains some sort of rights to it.
In some dialogue with the rights holder, they were perfectly cool with the font being embedded in the .exe itself, which makes the font trivially extractable - as they understood, but were simply insistent that the font not be directly distributed to users as a stand-alone file.
It's my understanding you're using it for profit you're gonna have to pay for the font, and conversely if I'm doing propaganda I don't care if you shoot me, so why do I care if you sue me?
I was under the same impression, but it seems that in the majority of jurisdictions, the use of a Font does not meet the threshhold for a meaningful work under copyright law. To clarify, the use of the Font itself can be restricted under certain copyright aspects, i.e. offering tools or distributing the font file.
But texts set in a specific font are no subject to copyright.
> so why do I care if you sue me?
Risk exposure I suppose? It seems copyright on fonts is mostly defined by case law. In the US, font files are apparently copyrightable because they're classified as a computer program, the actual artistic value of the displayed font is not taken into account at all.
>I was under the same impression, but it seems that in the majority of jurisdictions, the use of a Font does not meet the threshhold for a meaningful work under copyright law.
Thanks for this! I'll look for a citation in the bottom of the wikipedia, but I believe you.
(Sorry to continue being "that guy" but while you raise good points about law and risk, I am once again forced to remind the hackers that Wikipeia is not a primary source)
>It seems copyright on fonts is mostly defined by case law. In the US, font files are apparently copyrightable because they're classified as a computer program, the actual artistic value of the displayed font is not taken into account at all.
I was born in Appalachia -- that's fucked up, especially since the "founding fathers" we Americans love to stan set much shorter copyright limits and many fonts, even computer ones, are quite old.
>And that the author and authors of any map, chart, book or books already made and
composed, and not printed or published, or that shall hereafter be made and composed, being a citizen or citizens of these United States, or resident therein, and his or their executors, administrators or assigns, shall have the sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending such map, chart, book or books, for the like term of fourteen years from the time of recording the title thereof in the clerk’s office as aforesaid. And if, at the expiration of the said term, the author or authors, or any of them, be living, and a citizen or citizens of these United States, or resident therein, the same exclusive right shall be continued to him or them, his or their executors, administrators or assigns, for the further term of fourteen years; Provided, He or they shall cause the title thereof to be a second time recorded and published in the same manner as is herein after directed, and that within six months before the expiration of the first term of fourteen years aforesaid.
To quote from the article:
>Typefaces cannot be protected by copyright in the United States The idea that typefaces cannot be copyrighted in the United States has been black letter law since the introduction of Code of Federal Regulations, Ch 37, Sec. 202.1(e) in 1992.[10] The legal precedent that typefaces are not eligible for protection under U.S. copyright law was established before that in 1978 in Eltra Corp. v. Ringer. However, fonts can be protected by design patent, and computer programs that implement typefaces may be protected by copyright.
Which seems to be roughly the same as how it is handled in my home countries jurisdiction.
I could have linked you an actual decision from my home countries national court, but I assumed posting links to german court decisions would only add to the confusion.
I can try to find if the interpretation on the german wiki entry had a reference in english, that would show what I said was at least true for Germany, Switzerland and Austria.
> These fonts were made in the 80s, like me. They should be a free for all.
It makes some weird sense, from a legal standpoint. If you argue that a font file, i.e. the digital representation of a font constitutes as source code, you suddenly have a digital good that is widely accepted as being copyrightable. An exception would not make sense in that instance.
Even then though, only the file representation, i.e. the code would be copyrightable. If you vectorize bitmaps of existing fonts, like in the article, you'd be fine.
And honestly, it stands to reason that vector images files do not constitute a computer program, but you'd have to convince a judge that they cannot encode turing complete information. And first you'd have to teach a judge what a turing machine is.
> It's my understanding you're using it for profit you're gonna have to pay for the font
I've only read the article and am not familiar enough with copyright to outright tell a company to "go for it," but the author seems to be under the impression that font files generated using this technique are a-ok to use for profit.
If you wanted to create a font-generating NN and are worried about future IP laws deciding NNs are not transformative but mere derivative works of the training data, this would be potentially interesting. And if you wanted to ever sell such a business, say, to a certain private equity-owned company with $200m+ in annual revenue, it would be very useful to be able to show during due diligence that you had belt-and-suspenders your NN's data and it didn't all have to be thrown out & restarted from scratch.
What about the font I designed on my air-gapped computer in a secure nuclear bunker that no one but me has seen? Obviously the author is wrong and this must not go uncorrected!
Or maybe you’re just being a little overly pedantic?
> The key point here is that the shape of the glyphs themselves, for example, non-trademarked text posted on advertisements or products with printed text, are not copyrightable. So long as you’re not stealing the creative work, like the advertisement, itself, the shape of each letter is in the public domain.
There is a jump from this assertion to:
> This got me thinking, as all things do, on whether I could simply scrape the internet for public, non-creative, non-trademarked use of fonts
The missing step here is that the glyphs for a webpage are not embedded in some sort of rendered image or physical medium. They're _rendered from the copyrighted font file_ to the browser.
The font file is delivered to the browser and that copyrighted file is used to render the glyphs.
This pipeline might work for creating a font that is "inspired by" the available glyphs rendered in the credits of your favorite film.
But downloading the entire copyrighted font file, generating a character sheet from it and clipping the individual characters from that sheet? I can't imagine how any sensible court system would not consider that a derivative work.