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These crazy outdated licenses that let you print as many magazines or books you want forever, for a one-time price.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.
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.
Part of the problem is that Monotype has a bit of a monopoly in the upper segment of the market though right? I know they're not the only players, but it feels like they've vacuumed up enough small, successful foundries that they now control enough of the market that they can get away with the kind of aggressive behavior that wouldn't be tenable in a healthier, more competitive marketplace.
From Wikipedia [0]
> Via acquisitions including Linotype GmbH, International Typeface Corporation, Bitstream, FontShop, URW, Hoefler & Co., Fontsmith, Fontworks [ja] and Colophon Foundry, the company has gained the rights to major font families including Helvetica, ITC Franklin Gothic, Optima, ITC Avant Garde, Palatino, FF DIN and Gotham. It also owns MyFonts, used by many independent font design studios.[3] The company is owned by HGGC, a private equity firm.
For those less familiar with them, those are BIG names, and the acquisition of them could perhaps aptly be compared, for instance, to Disney's acquisitions of properties like Lucasfilm and Marvel.
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.
I don't know what a Hermès is or connotates, but I think the complaint is as much about the artificial and seemingly arbitrary restrictions as opposed to purely the price.
You can try to create a Veblen good out of a digital artifact and play the all or nothing game, but it's proven very hard to restrict something which can be copied at no cost and with no limitations.
When you buy expensive clothes, it would be silly for the seller to try and license them to be only worn on Mondays, or at dress-code events, or based on your taxable income. People are not going to take your "license" seriously, even if you'd have some legal grounds and might well win a legal argument.
I have a great deal of admiration for artists and designers, and I know that creating a multiple-variant typeface with great applicability that's either historically correct or truly innovative is an art form.
This reminds me of Napster-era debates about artists' rights versus distribution.
I feel like you're arguing against a point GP entirely didn't make. GP is saying there's a market mismatch here - there's money on the table that font makers are ignoring, and simultaneously apps end up using uglier default fonts. Both parties could benefit from meeting in the middle.
There are very few fonts that exist in all the major platforms. But there are excellent free and open source fonts that you can use. I also want to point out that if you make an "app" and publish it on a platform like appstore, you are basically a slave to the platform.
I'd say the same about shows and movies, which is where the supermajority of this conversation is typically focused, especially given how much free content is over YouTube.
The fonts loaded on one machine are typically not loaded reliably on all machines, so you need to distribute fonts with your application. Doing this is probably a violation of the license that all those "free fonts" were distributed under, so your only options are:
1. Public Domain Fonts
2. Fonts that cost money
The set of public domain fonts is pretty small and most of them are low quality - not all, thankfully - and out of the ones that don't suck a lot of them only support the latin character set.
As for fonts that cost money, just to give you one example, I recently asked a foundry what it would cost to license a font for my indie game. Their quote was $1100/yr with a ceiling of 300k copies sold (so I'd need to come back and pay them more on a yearly basis and the cost would go up if I was successful). This was only for 3 variants - regular, italic and medium - and only for the latin character set. For one typeface.
Certainly if I was throwing around millions of dollars I could pay that without blinking, but it's far out of reach for independent developers (and they know I'm independent)
Lots of games distribute "baked fonts", where the ttf/otf is statically rendered into a bunch of texture atlases and they ship the atlases instead of the font. Many font licenses I've seen don't permit this kind of use, so I suspect a lot of games are actually in violation of their font licenses, if they paid to license their fonts at all.
Hell, just the other day I prepared a PowerPoint presentation for work using one of the stock Office fonts and then I opened it in Office on another machine and the font was missing...
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 not 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.
Well if the same font could be independently discovered, would your view change at all? Of course at high resolutions this is unlikely but I feel like if I made the same image within 5 pixels wide and 9 pixels high and two colors as some font it might be accused of being similar, much like with some accusations in music.
I guess you’ve never worked with one of those designers whose friend’s cofounder’s VC’s boyfriend shops at Neeman Marcus. Try telling one of them they have to use a normal legible tried and true font :s
> I guess these font sellers imagine there’s still some app boom - a Klondike rush with developers bathing in dollars.
The way this works is the design team picks some font, uses it on all of the design proposals, gets it approved by management, and then only later does a developer realize it’s a paid font they’ve been asked to put in the app. The teams want to avoid going back for design change approvals so eventually they just give up and pay the money.
It’s not developers picky boutique expensive fonts, in my experience. It’s the designers who don’t think about the consequences because by they point it’s off their plate.
To be fair though, there’s so many open source fonts out there of good quality that you don’t have to pay anyone to use their font. Why go against copyright laws when you can just use fonts like Roboto (or really, anything on Google Fonts) for free?
As a mostly now digital designer I get it... but also realize that digital has the capacity to scale instantly where print doesnt. Want to get 40 million editions out digitally? Gimme a sec. Physically? Gonna need to get some investment capital and a few years ramp up.
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.
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.
Jokes aside, I'm not very impressed with this single color font art. Maybe in 30 years we will have 16 color fonts?
The color fonts currently work in Firefox and Edge, Safari support SBIX, Chrome on Android has CBDT
I can barely find a website that has an example. The ones I found have a few characters or a single sentence, very few fonts and they are not very pretty. Some of the implementations warn that the client might catch fire.
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.
I researched it for Russia recently and apparently the law is much stricter about fonts here than in the US. Both the character shapes and the "code" are copyrightable so you ain't getting away with converting it into a different format either. Companies did get sued over this and did have to pay millions of rubles in fines and licensing fees for their past usage. Not sure about individuals but I wouldn't try my luck with any non-free fonts made by Russian designers.
I 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).
font licensing feels like it never caught up with how software actually gets made now. charging more for app use than for mass print always seemed backwards, especially when indie devs are scraping by and a font costs more than your backend. no wonder people end up using “free alternatives” without looking too hard at where they came from.
I am of the opinion that the licenses for fonts in software are too expensive, but why is the pricing ‘backwards’? Book publishers don’t make a lot of profit, while software developers do.
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.
How does that square with this article, which says that the music was composed by Dutch musician Melchior Rietveldt specifically for the ad? (And that they failed to pay him properly for the use of the music.)
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:
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.
> 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.
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.
If one didn't know better, one could conclude the history of this ad campaign suggests it was performance art done by creatives ideologically opposed to the client.
I'm sure these artist-loving folks just paid the very cheapest ad/video agency they could find to make this that seemed capable of completing the project, and that agency was the kind of place that does sloppy stuff like that (many do, haha).
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.
I suspect it is probably right that they would find it more profitable to sell 100 copies for $10 than 1 copy for $1000. But I do wonder, it could be that the occasional $10,000 sale to a large company pays more in the long run for less hassle. It’s hard to know. Do any creative agencies release their sales information?
I’d say there should at least be a small niece for a company to profit off the back of less expensive more reasonably licensed font sales. I don’t know how many lawyers a small company would need to do this though. Would they be sued by Adobe (either for fonts that look similar, or with pointless lawsuits just to wear them out?)
Part of the value may be in how exclusive the font seems. So in that view 1 sale of $1000 is more valuable because it’s more exclusive. Basically, one potential attribute of fonts is they’re a luxury not a commodity.
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:
Thanks for emphasising the US perspective, because it matters.
IAAL outside the US, and I'm aware in UK and EU law copyright can subsist in typefaces, and there are specific provisions relating to them. Since FACT is a UK Org, taking UK law as an example, see ref. []
I personally find it a good example of aging law. It's quite difficult to reconcile the law as drafted (in 1987) with modern digital font uses. Is a PDF with embedded fonts "material produced by typesetting", or is it an "article specifically designed or adapted for producing material in a particular typeface"? Arguably it could be either.
I'm not aware of this ever having been considered by a court.
I find it pretty funny that the American legal system explicitly doesn't copyright fonts (which are quite obviously creative works, in my opinion) but still enforces software patents.
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?
> 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:
Copyright for most (if not all) fonts seems like something that just shouldn’t work. We want things in the public domain, like Shakespeare, and we want derivative works protected. Fonts are tiny differences on public domain work that 90% of people can’t tell. You wouldn’t want Disney to claim every pencil stroke difference on Mikey’s to be subject to different copyright terms, it would become a kind of perpetual copyright strategy. If there are true technical improvements to the way we represent letters, they should be covered by patents, with their shorter terms.
What saddens me is that a lot of people are so ignorant that they don't even realize a font is something that takes creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort to design.
I remember trying to explain to some colleagues why I paid about 100 bucks for the font I use and why I wouldn’t share it with them and they just couldn’t get it.
(It’s Berkeley mono).
I don’t even know how many glyphs it is (it’s thousands) but for something I’m looking at for 6-8 hours a day, every single day and is the absolute peak of perfection (at least to me), 100 bucks seems like a fucking bargain to me.
shrug I guess these folks never sold something they made completely by themselves maybe.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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."
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.
TIL: font designs are not copyrightable in the USA. Font files are but the design itself is not. It seems you are free to copy the design, but not the file. Not sure how that plays out in practice. Is it common to copy a font design or is it just more common to be inspired by a font design but make a new font that's in the same general design space? Like say Arial seems inspired by Helvetica but is not the same.
Looking forward to someone doing the same for Gill Sans and most of the Monotype catalog now that they've switched to annual licensing for webfonts (pay once use forever is gone)
I spent some time last weekend playing with LLMs and SVGs- it turns out SVG is a domain specific language and LLMs know how to use it. I was able to get an LLM (grok from X.ai) to author SVGs from a description of what I wanted it to look like, and to modify existing SVG text to customize files that weren’t perfectly to my liking.
Fonts are also written in domain specific languages, I need to experiment with whether LLMs can author or modify fonts.
I do not think that the ridiculous terms that font and clip art and stock photo companies now offer, is going to be a viable business model in a couple of years.
We will all be able to use (for example) “LLM Helvetica Free” without any license.
You inspired me to attempt this and sadly GPT, Claude, and Gemini all said they didn’t have the software tools to do it. But as you mentioned, it can generate SVGs and those can be used to create a font.
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.
It's even harder to get away with pirating fonts now with web fonts. Either the service can detect you pulling a font for a domain that isn't paying for it or webcrawlers will find unpaid fonts.
>> Either the service can detect you pulling a font for a domain that isn't paying for it...
Is that really a thing? Markup in a web page tells how to display the text. Saying "use this font over here on this other server" seems fair game on some level. Might not be on another level, but it's technically the end user downloading a file that's publicly available on some server.
"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.
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.
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.
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
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).
I don't have objections to the tool. My issues are with how much power we have assigned to that tool.
The right to claim renumeration for, and restrict use of, one's work should not IMO extend for multiple generations. I'm not sure it should even extend for one.
What happens if you present an image of a page in some font to an LLM, and ask it to make you a font file for that font? An LLM could probably not only do that, but create matching characters for ones not already present.
- Font programmes are. (Generally 1980 Computer Software Copyright Act.)
- Cleanroom reimplementation of software is not copyright infringement. An AI without access to original source code would likely pass this test.
- As a further twist, it appears likely that courts will hold that AI creations are themselves not copyrightable (original works of authorship), such that the product of any such project would itself be public domain. (See: <https://www.reuters.com/legal/ai-generated-art-cannot-receiv...>.)
The whole scenario appears to open the door to liberation of all fonts for which public letterforms are available. This would be an "AI hole" (analogous to the ... analogue hole) for escaping copyright. Whether this liberation would occur before foundries passed new protective legislation will be an interesting question.
A good question to work on is whether an LLM, given a reasonable number of characters of a font, can generate letter forms for the entire Unicode character space. Probably. It's a style matching problem, and LLMs are good at that.
Iceshrimp, or at least this JavaScript version of it, is a fork of Misskey, which has been mentioned on HN a few times. If you've heard of Mastodon, Misskey and its forks participate in the same decentralized social network - Mastodon users can like and comment on the tweet-like posts that a Misskey user makes and vice-versa.
The Iceshrimp devs are also working on a "port" to .NET that's basically a brand new social media app, but with an upgrade path from the JavaScript version.
I also use Iceshrimp to self-host my own fediverse account and I think it's pretty good software. I think it has a better UI that Mastodon and it has some cutesy features that Mastodon lacks, like being able to emoji-react to posts.
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.
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).
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.
Typefaces are not copyrightable but fonts are off, using a font with a knockoff typeface is not copyright infringement because it is not using the copyrighted font.
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.
>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.
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:
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.
But you can copyright a font name, so if someone copies your work and releases it under a new name... that's that's like creating a copy of the car piece by piece and giving it your own name.
So they were right: we not downloading a car, we never were. We were all just making copies.
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.
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.
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.
Part of the problem is that Monotype has a bit of a monopoly in the upper segment of the market though right? I know they're not the only players, but it feels like they've vacuumed up enough small, successful foundries that they now control enough of the market that they can get away with the kind of aggressive behavior that wouldn't be tenable in a healthier, more competitive marketplace.
From Wikipedia [0]
> Via acquisitions including Linotype GmbH, International Typeface Corporation, Bitstream, FontShop, URW, Hoefler & Co., Fontsmith, Fontworks [ja] and Colophon Foundry, the company has gained the rights to major font families including Helvetica, ITC Franklin Gothic, Optima, ITC Avant Garde, Palatino, FF DIN and Gotham. It also owns MyFonts, used by many independent font design studios.[3] The company is owned by HGGC, a private equity firm.
For those less familiar with them, those are BIG names, and the acquisition of them could perhaps aptly be compared, for instance, to Disney's acquisitions of properties like Lucasfilm and Marvel.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotype_Imaging
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.
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I don't know what a Hermès is or connotates, but I think the complaint is as much about the artificial and seemingly arbitrary restrictions as opposed to purely the price.
You can try to create a Veblen good out of a digital artifact and play the all or nothing game, but it's proven very hard to restrict something which can be copied at no cost and with no limitations.
When you buy expensive clothes, it would be silly for the seller to try and license them to be only worn on Mondays, or at dress-code events, or based on your taxable income. People are not going to take your "license" seriously, even if you'd have some legal grounds and might well win a legal argument.
I have a great deal of admiration for artists and designers, and I know that creating a multiple-variant typeface with great applicability that's either historically correct or truly innovative is an art form.
This reminds me of Napster-era debates about artists' rights versus distribution.
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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.
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I feel like you're arguing against a point GP entirely didn't make. GP is saying there's a market mismatch here - there's money on the table that font makers are ignoring, and simultaneously apps end up using uglier default fonts. Both parties could benefit from meeting in the middle.
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There are very few fonts that exist in all the major platforms. But there are excellent free and open source fonts that you can use. I also want to point out that if you make an "app" and publish it on a platform like appstore, you are basically a slave to the platform.
I'd say the same about shows and movies, which is where the supermajority of this conversation is typically focused, especially given how much free content is over YouTube.
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The fonts loaded on one machine are typically not loaded reliably on all machines, so you need to distribute fonts with your application. Doing this is probably a violation of the license that all those "free fonts" were distributed under, so your only options are:
1. Public Domain Fonts
2. Fonts that cost money
The set of public domain fonts is pretty small and most of them are low quality - not all, thankfully - and out of the ones that don't suck a lot of them only support the latin character set.
As for fonts that cost money, just to give you one example, I recently asked a foundry what it would cost to license a font for my indie game. Their quote was $1100/yr with a ceiling of 300k copies sold (so I'd need to come back and pay them more on a yearly basis and the cost would go up if I was successful). This was only for 3 variants - regular, italic and medium - and only for the latin character set. For one typeface.
Certainly if I was throwing around millions of dollars I could pay that without blinking, but it's far out of reach for independent developers (and they know I'm independent)
Lots of games distribute "baked fonts", where the ttf/otf is statically rendered into a bunch of texture atlases and they ship the atlases instead of the font. Many font licenses I've seen don't permit this kind of use, so I suspect a lot of games are actually in violation of their font licenses, if they paid to license their fonts at all.
Hell, just the other day I prepared a PowerPoint presentation for work using one of the stock Office fonts and then I opened it in Office on another machine and the font was missing...
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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 not 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.
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Well if the same font could be independently discovered, would your view change at all? Of course at high resolutions this is unlikely but I feel like if I made the same image within 5 pixels wide and 9 pixels high and two colors as some font it might be accused of being similar, much like with some accusations in music.
I guess you’ve never worked with one of those designers whose friend’s cofounder’s VC’s boyfriend shops at Neeman Marcus. Try telling one of them they have to use a normal legible tried and true font :s
> I guess these font sellers imagine there’s still some app boom - a Klondike rush with developers bathing in dollars.
The way this works is the design team picks some font, uses it on all of the design proposals, gets it approved by management, and then only later does a developer realize it’s a paid font they’ve been asked to put in the app. The teams want to avoid going back for design change approvals so eventually they just give up and pay the money.
It’s not developers picky boutique expensive fonts, in my experience. It’s the designers who don’t think about the consequences because by they point it’s off their plate.
To be fair though, there’s so many open source fonts out there of good quality that you don’t have to pay anyone to use their font. Why go against copyright laws when you can just use fonts like Roboto (or really, anything on Google Fonts) for free?
As a mostly now digital designer I get it... but also realize that digital has the capacity to scale instantly where print doesnt. Want to get 40 million editions out digitally? Gimme a sec. Physically? Gonna need to get some investment capital and a few years ramp up.
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.
And god forbid you to accidently ship the font with your game or mobile app! :)
How does one even use a font in an app without shipping it with the app? In a logo or something?
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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.
Send in the LLMs!
Jokes aside, I'm not very impressed with this single color font art. Maybe in 30 years we will have 16 color fonts?
The color fonts currently work in Firefox and Edge, Safari support SBIX, Chrome on Android has CBDT
I can barely find a website that has an example. The ones I found have a few characters or a single sentence, very few fonts and they are not very pretty. Some of the implementations warn that the client might catch fire.
I'm not impressed.
Some random examples of the state of the art.
https://www.throwup.it/en/artists/mars/
I only purchase fonts for graphic design projects (mostly branding). For UIs I'm perfectly happy with Google Fonts.
A diffusion model for fonts. Isn't it time they get ripped off too? /SARCASM
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43776539
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.
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"
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.
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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).
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font licensing feels like it never caught up with how software actually gets made now. charging more for app use than for mass print always seemed backwards, especially when indie devs are scraping by and a font costs more than your backend. no wonder people end up using “free alternatives” without looking too hard at where they came from.
I am of the opinion that the licenses for fonts in software are too expensive, but why is the pricing ‘backwards’? Book publishers don’t make a lot of profit, while software developers do.
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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.
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.
The song is also stolen: it’s an unauthorised interpolation of one man army by the prodigy:
https://open.spotify.com/track/65zwPZvsUCU55IpyWddFsK?si=bBf...
How does that square with this article, which says that the music was composed by Dutch musician Melchior Rietveldt specifically for the ad? (And that they failed to pay him properly for the use of the music.)
https://torrentfreak.com/rights-group-fined-for-not-paying-a...
You can't copyright a font.
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:
https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/chtlj/vol10/iss1/5/
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Maybe not in the US, but fonts do enjoy copyright protection in at least some European markets.[1] I frequently encountered this campaign on DVDs for rent in the local Blockbuster equivalents, so I don't think it is entirely theoretical infringement, either.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti... and forward
FACT/FAST are a UK organisation, where font copyright is espressly enumerated in the copyright law.
They absolutely are copyrighted and big money.
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"You wouldn't copyright a font"
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.
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> 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.
They are computer programs. Not sure why you’d crudely insult the judge for saying that.
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Well they're programs tbf
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.
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They stole the music too.
Anti-pirating ad music stolen [2013]: https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/01/29/3678851.h...
If one didn't know better, one could conclude the history of this ad campaign suggests it was performance art done by creatives ideologically opposed to the client.
I'm sure these artist-loving folks just paid the very cheapest ad/video agency they could find to make this that seemed capable of completing the project, and that agency was the kind of place that does sloppy stuff like that (many do, haha).
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.
I suspect they are printing more money with the 1-10 megacorps who can afford to pay millions of dollars for per-eyeballs licenses.
I suspect it is probably right that they would find it more profitable to sell 100 copies for $10 than 1 copy for $1000. But I do wonder, it could be that the occasional $10,000 sale to a large company pays more in the long run for less hassle. It’s hard to know. Do any creative agencies release their sales information?
I’d say there should at least be a small niece for a company to profit off the back of less expensive more reasonably licensed font sales. I don’t know how many lawyers a small company would need to do this though. Would they be sued by Adobe (either for fonts that look similar, or with pointless lawsuits just to wear them out?)
Part of the value may be in how exclusive the font seems. So in that view 1 sale of $1000 is more valuable because it’s more exclusive. Basically, one potential attribute of fonts is they’re a luxury not a commodity.
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:
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.
Thanks for emphasising the US perspective, because it matters.
IAAL outside the US, and I'm aware in UK and EU law copyright can subsist in typefaces, and there are specific provisions relating to them. Since FACT is a UK Org, taking UK law as an example, see ref. []
I personally find it a good example of aging law. It's quite difficult to reconcile the law as drafted (in 1987) with modern digital font uses. Is a PDF with embedded fonts "material produced by typesetting", or is it an "article specifically designed or adapted for producing material in a particular typeface"? Arguably it could be either.
I'm not aware of this ever having been considered by a court.
[] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/part/I/chapter/...
I find it pretty funny that the American legal system explicitly doesn't copyright fonts (which are quite obviously creative works, in my opinion) but still enforces software patents.
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?
> 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:
http://www.gamezero.com/team-0/whats_new/past/xband-pc.html
Copyright for most (if not all) fonts seems like something that just shouldn’t work. We want things in the public domain, like Shakespeare, and we want derivative works protected. Fonts are tiny differences on public domain work that 90% of people can’t tell. You wouldn’t want Disney to claim every pencil stroke difference on Mikey’s to be subject to different copyright terms, it would become a kind of perpetual copyright strategy. If there are true technical improvements to the way we represent letters, they should be covered by patents, with their shorter terms.
What saddens me is that a lot of people are so ignorant that they don't even realize a font is something that takes creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort to design.
I remember trying to explain to some colleagues why I paid about 100 bucks for the font I use and why I wouldn’t share it with them and they just couldn’t get it.
(It’s Berkeley mono).
I don’t even know how many glyphs it is (it’s thousands) but for something I’m looking at for 6-8 hours a day, every single day and is the absolute peak of perfection (at least to me), 100 bucks seems like a fucking bargain to me.
shrug I guess these folks never sold something they made completely by themselves maybe.
>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.
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The "peak of perfection" does not support even just European languages, not having full coverage even for Latin scripts. But it's a "love letter for the golden age of computing", and the golden age had massive problems with scripts for languages other than English, so maybe it's intentional.
https://usgraphics.com/static/products/TX-02/datasheet/TX-02...
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> Berkeley Mono
Link for the lazy https://neil.computer/notes/berkeley-mono-font-variant-popul...
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> 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.
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.
how does that work? you set this font to be used by all your computers and devices?
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.
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.
>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.
Not every font is digitized from old samples.
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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.
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.
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.
>> 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."
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.
TIL: font designs are not copyrightable in the USA. Font files are but the design itself is not. It seems you are free to copy the design, but not the file. Not sure how that plays out in practice. Is it common to copy a font design or is it just more common to be inspired by a font design but make a new font that's in the same general design space? Like say Arial seems inspired by Helvetica but is not the same.
There are definitely fonts that are nearly identical copies, e.g. Palladio is a clone of Palatino (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatino#Free_and_open-source_...)
Looking forward to someone doing the same for Gill Sans and most of the Monotype catalog now that they've switched to annual licensing for webfonts (pay once use forever is gone)
I know we don't really do humor on HN, but working in the car industry, this comedic Aussie rebuttal always amused me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fb7N-JtQWGI
It's also one of the funniest scenes of The IT Crowd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg
I was curious who was behind this campaign - it has a wikipedia page (answer: FACT and MPAA):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Wouldn%27t_Steal_a_Car
A popular response
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4
I spent some time last weekend playing with LLMs and SVGs- it turns out SVG is a domain specific language and LLMs know how to use it. I was able to get an LLM (grok from X.ai) to author SVGs from a description of what I wanted it to look like, and to modify existing SVG text to customize files that weren’t perfectly to my liking.
Fonts are also written in domain specific languages, I need to experiment with whether LLMs can author or modify fonts.
I do not think that the ridiculous terms that font and clip art and stock photo companies now offer, is going to be a viable business model in a couple of years.
We will all be able to use (for example) “LLM Helvetica Free” without any license.
You inspired me to attempt this and sadly GPT, Claude, and Gemini all said they didn’t have the software tools to do it. But as you mentioned, it can generate SVGs and those can be used to create a font.
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.
It's even harder to get away with pirating fonts now with web fonts. Either the service can detect you pulling a font for a domain that isn't paying for it or webcrawlers will find unpaid fonts.
>> Either the service can detect you pulling a font for a domain that isn't paying for it...
Is that really a thing? Markup in a web page tells how to display the text. Saying "use this font over here on this other server" seems fair game on some level. Might not be on another level, but it's technically the end user downloading a file that's publicly available on some server.
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A downloadable file can be hosted elsewhere.
"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.
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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.
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.
This is strongly jurisdiction-dependent.
US patent and copyright derive from A1S8C8 of the US constitution, "to promote science and useful arts".
Much EU law derives from a French tradition based on droight d'auteur, or moral rights.
International copyright code (Berne Convention) rips and mashes from both traditions.
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
>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.
Copyright in the sense of corporate greed is indeed an issue.
Whenever talk about that being a shame, I am thinking about the individual author who lost control over their work and still can not feed themselves.
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All law is a fiction, by that argument.
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).
I don't have objections to the tool. My issues are with how much power we have assigned to that tool.
The right to claim renumeration for, and restrict use of, one's work should not IMO extend for multiple generations. I'm not sure it should even extend for one.
Blame the current wave of rentier capitalism. Pioneered by SaaS. The funds like the one behind this site played a role in the acceleration.
I would, and I have.
It's fresh takes like this that keep me coming back to HN, year after year.
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.
Like, the actual lead type?
What happens if you present an image of a page in some font to an LLM, and ask it to make you a font file for that font? An LLM could probably not only do that, but create matching characters for ones not already present.
Oh, and tell it to fix the kerning.
As a matter of US law:
- Font letterforms are not copyrightable. (Eltra Corp. v. Ringer, 579 F.2d 294 (4th Cir. 1978) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eltra_Corp._v._Ringer>)
- Font programmes are. (Generally 1980 Computer Software Copyright Act.)
- Cleanroom reimplementation of software is not copyright infringement. An AI without access to original source code would likely pass this test.
- As a further twist, it appears likely that courts will hold that AI creations are themselves not copyrightable (original works of authorship), such that the product of any such project would itself be public domain. (See: <https://www.reuters.com/legal/ai-generated-art-cannot-receiv...>.)
The whole scenario appears to open the door to liberation of all fonts for which public letterforms are available. This would be an "AI hole" (analogous to the ... analogue hole) for escaping copyright. Whether this liberation would occur before foundries passed new protective legislation will be an interesting question.
Right.
A good question to work on is whether an LLM, given a reasonable number of characters of a font, can generate letter forms for the entire Unicode character space. Probably. It's a style matching problem, and LLMs are good at that.
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If you've seen a bunch of memes on 4chan and 8chan with TEFF Renard, Trinite, and/or Lexicon fonts, that was me.
An AI font generatooorrrr!! (whoop whoop horn sound effect:)
https://www.calligrapher.ai/
>Powered by Iceshrimp
Sort of off-topic, but interesting engine, which I never heard about (wasn't ever mentioned on HN either: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Iceshrimp):
>Iceshrimp is a decentralized and federated social networking service, implementing the ActivityPub standard.
https://iceshrimp.dev/iceshrimp/iceshrimp.net
Iceshrimp, or at least this JavaScript version of it, is a fork of Misskey, which has been mentioned on HN a few times. If you've heard of Mastodon, Misskey and its forks participate in the same decentralized social network - Mastodon users can like and comment on the tweet-like posts that a Misskey user makes and vice-versa.
The Iceshrimp devs are also working on a "port" to .NET that's basically a brand new social media app, but with an upgrade path from the JavaScript version.
I also use Iceshrimp to self-host my own fediverse account and I think it's pretty good software. I think it has a better UI that Mastodon and it has some cutesy features that Mastodon lacks, like being able to emoji-react to posts.
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.
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).
Looks like the wikipedia page needs a bit of updating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Wouldn%27t_Steal_a_Car
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.
Typefaces are not copyrightable but fonts are off, using a font with a knockoff typeface is not copyright infringement because it is not using the copyrighted font.
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?
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.
But was Xband created by copying the math from FF Confidential?
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.
>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.
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But... fonts aren't copyrightable. Was this a patented font?
here is a font stealing search query if anyone is interested. I used to have it as a custom search engine on chrome:
URL with %s in place of query: https://www.google.com/search?q=intitle%3A%22index.of%22+(tt...
Bought the Adobe Font Folio -- TWICE.
Now, every single font in the font folio is free with a $30./month Adobe sub.
> ...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.
Wife works in corp. legal. Just had to settle a demand for font licenses that the company front end used without approval. $40k.
Its a good gimmick if you can get it.
Off-topic, but with this ad I always think of the IT Crowd spoof
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg
Relevant:
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_...
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.
0: https://torrentfreak.com/file-sharing-heroine-lilly-allen-is...
I definitely would
There was a nice video on how you can't copyright a typeface recently by "Ok, so" over on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J06tluN7rtE
But you can copyright a font name, so if someone copies your work and releases it under a new name... that's that's like creating a copy of the car piece by piece and giving it your own name.
So they were right: we not downloading a car, we never were. We were all just making copies.
fonts.google.com has 1816 different font families that are all open-source. So no, I wouldn't steal a font when there's so many available for free.
There are many movies available for free
Some of them even use those free fonts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ
"Entity that conducts IP theft whines about IP theft"... just like OpenAI whining about Deepseek distillation...
Remember kids: information wants to be free!
Edit: OK, the original post is extremely unclear.
To clarify: the original font is named "FF Confidential" (which the post doesn't even mention).
The seemingly illegal clone is called "XBAND Rough".
copying the visual is legal, copying the file is not — in this case it seems the clone is of the file AND therefore the appearance
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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.