Comment by crazygringo
1 day ago
There's no evidence XBAND Rough was extracted from a digital source bit-for-bit, unless someone can point to any?
It seems like it was just a hobbyist project to recreate the look of the font from the anti-piracy ads? Which is 100% legal.
Edit: OK, so the original font appears to be "FF Confidential"? Why didn't the post even mention that? So maybe it is a digital clone, which would be illegal. But then strange that there aren't any DMCA takedowns of it on major font sites?
In this case it seems like what happened was:
1. Catapult Entertainment made/commissioned XBAND Rough as a clone of Confidential for their use somewhere (promotional materials, PC software, who knows?). The font file contains the text "Copyright 1996 Catapult Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved".
2. The "You wouldn't steal a car" campaign pirated Catapult's copyrighted font file. I think they got away with it because Catapult was no longer in business at that point. They were acquired by Mpath Interactive in 1996 and Mpath's IP got acquired by GameSpy in 2000.
Idk if it's provable how it was recreated but if you type in "XBAND Rough" into the sampler box at the bottom of the page https://www.myfonts.com/collections/ff-confidential-font-fon... and compare to https://fontzone.net/font-details/xband-rough it's exactly the same and the letter splotching is very distinct in the lower case letters.
"It looks the same" is completely different than having been directly extracted from digital source.
If the digital source is the only thing that can be copyrighted, then you have to prove the digital source is what was used inappropriately. If you can't prove that, either because it didn't happen or because there's no technological way to prove it, then you can't prove copyright infringement.
Ages ago, I consulted on a case where a converted font was included in a product --- it was even simpler than https://luc.devroye.org/kinch.html since no transformations were applied --- just had to figure out which version of which font editor was used to open up the font file and then which settings were used to re-generate the font in the new format used for the infringing product.
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If I were going to knock it off I'd duplicate the splotching exactly, too. I'd prepare as sample as a bitmap, use any of the various raster-to-vector tracers on it to get an SVG, clean up the SVG of any conversion artifacts, then make it into a type format. (Heck, there's probably a fun problem in here to train an algorithm to do the cleanup and conversion. You could probably knock-off the hinting and ligatures, too.)
XBAND Rough could not have been inspired by those ads, as the OP shows the ads are using XBAND, and not FF Confidential, the original tyepface it cloned.
We don’t know what the ads (meaning, the videos) used. We only know what was on their website.