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.
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.