[HN Gopher] You wouldn't steal a font
___________________________________________________________________
You wouldn't steal a font
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 482 points
Date : 2025-04-23 19:42 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fedi.rib.gay)
(TXT) w3m dump (fedi.rib.gay)
| dporter wrote:
| I would, and I have.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| It's fresh takes like this that keep me coming back to HN, year
| after year.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| azalemeth wrote:
| That is an absolutely _brilliant_ turn of events - strong
| evidence that the font in an anti-piracy campaign was itself
| arguably a copyright-infringing knock-off.
|
| Someone should sue FACT for copyright infringement - and refuse
| to settle.
| charcircuit wrote:
| You can't copyright a font.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| They absolutely are copyrighted and big money.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| In the US you can't copyright the shape of a font. You can
| copyright the programmatic description of a font.
|
| Design patents have been awarded for fonts. Trademark and
| trade dress protections could apply to the specific use of
| a font but not the font itself. The name of a font itself
| can be protected by trademark, as well.
|
| It's kind of a fascinating topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/
| wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...
|
| Edit: Back in the mid-90s versions of Corel Draw came with
| a Truetype editor. A friend of mine made "knock off"
| versions of fonts they liked from magazines, etc, and made
| them freely available on his ISP-provided web space. They
| drew them by hand, using printed samples as the
| inspiration.
|
| Over the years they got some angry messages from a few
| "type people" who didn't like that they'd made freely
| available knock-offs of various fonts. (I remember that
| "Keedy Sans" is one they knocked-off and got a particularly
| angry email about.)
|
| Further aside: My fiend made a sans serif typeface that has
| a distinct pattern of "erosion" at the edges and voids
| within the letters. It's easy to tell when it's the font he
| made. For the last 30 years I've kept samples of the
| various places I've seen it used, both on the Internet and
| on physical articles. I find it so amazing that a TTF file
| made by a kid in Corel Draw in 1994 or 1995 ended up being
| used in advertisements, on packaging, etc.
| knuckleheadsmif wrote:
| But you can Copyright the Name of a font. But yes long
| standing rule says you can copyright how letters &
| numbers look. Note that if you make a font that contains
| your own "artwork' that does not represent a letter or
| number you can get protection for that.
|
| And only fairly recently (in the past 30 years--I forget
| when Adobe won this court case) the courts ruled you can
| protect the code for generating a fonts look from being
| copied.
| weinzierl wrote:
| In the 90s Corel Draw came with a Helvetica named Swiss.
| Microsoft wasn't as bold and called theirs Arial.
| colechristensen wrote:
| You can, entirely legally, make a copy of any font and
| distribute it freely.
|
| You can't copy the font files themselves, but you can make
| visually indistinguishable new fonts with the same shapes
| because the shapes are not protected by copyright.
|
| Additionally though, _some_ fonts have design patents,
| which does protect the shape. Unlike copyright which has
| absolutely crazy expiration (like 150 years occasionally?)
| these patents only cover 15 to 20 years or shorter if
| abandoned.
|
| An example of Apple patenting a font valid 2017 to 2032:
| https://patents.google.com/patent/USD786338S1/en
| WillAdams wrote:
| 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/
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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?
| selkin wrote:
| 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.
| sct202 wrote:
| 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.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| 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.)
| ndiddy wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If it were the same file, it wouldn't be a "knock-off." It
| would be something like Optifonts. Very frowned upon, but
| definitely not illegal. Also, the kerning is usually trash,
| there will be way too many nodes in the vectors, and things
| may be missing. Annoying to work with, but in the case of
| Optifonts, free (because they're long out of business.)
|
| http://abfonts.freehostia.com/opti/
|
| https://luc.devroye.org/fonts-27506.html
| taneliv wrote:
| 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_prote
| cti... and forward
| NikkiA wrote:
| FACT/FAST are a UK organisation, where font copyright is
| espressly enumerated in the copyright law.
| andirk wrote:
| "You wouldn't copyright a font"
| xyst wrote:
| 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.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > was itself arguably a copyright-infringing knock-off.
|
| In US law, there is no such thing. The shape of a glyph (or
| many) isn't even slightly copyrightable. This is settled law.
| Fonts (on computers) have a special status that makes them
| semi-copyrightable in that some jackass judge from the 1980s
| called them "computer programs" and so they have the same
| protection as software... but this won't protect against
| knockoffs.
| spookie wrote:
| Well they're programs tbf
| codedokode wrote:
| Is this fair? It actually takes a lot of work (I assume) to
| design letter's shapes. Of course, not counting those who
| just trace 16-th century font without paying a compensation.
| amgutier wrote:
| > Of course, not counting those who just trace 16-th
| century font without paying a compensation
|
| I can't tell which way you mean this, but that sounds
| similar to the situation with most public domain musical
| compositions - the manuscripts may be completely open but a
| specific typesetting can still under copyright. And like
| that case, "just" tracing a font / typesetting a
| composition is still a fair amount of work.
| ars wrote:
| > takes a lot of work
|
| The "sweat of the brow" argument is not valid in the US.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow
| rafram wrote:
| They _are_ computer programs. Not sure why you'd crudely
| insult the judge for saying that.
| ks2048 wrote:
| 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
| sho_hn wrote:
| 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
| ayhanfuat wrote:
| It's also one of the funniest scenes of The IT Crowd:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg
| nobleach wrote:
| 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.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Can someone explain to me how you determine if a font is
| ripped/stolen?
|
| I was under the impression that fonts are just a collection of
| line arc/points.
|
| So is this a probabilistic comparison in that, if all of the line
| arc/points match another font - the chances are high it was
| ripped?
| lynndotpy wrote:
| In this case, per the link:
|
| > went sleuthing and quickly found a PDF from the campaign site
| with the font embedded
|
| So, the PDF had the font Xband Rough embedded inside of it.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| PDF is a famously (and hilariously) wild document format
| because it satisfied the need of being able to recreate a work
| piece faithfully using thousands of kinds of outputs, some of
| which didn't even exist when the document was created, to
| ideally arbitrary pixel resolution (see
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbCniw-BcW0 for a delightful
| and informative talk including this topic).
|
| As a result, in one of the modes of PDF you can save the entire
| font file for every font used by the PDF into the PDF itself,
| just in case it's not present on the recipient's machine.
| Costly? Sure! But what else are you going to do if your
| document uses a super-special font for displaying mathematical
| symbols or sanskrit or the glyphs of a language understood by
| fifty people on the planet and Unicode isn't widely adopted
| yet, having been invented just two years before PDF?
|
| So in this case, the author grabbed a copy of a PDF version of
| the ad (because those ads are still available online), cracked
| open the document itself, and found the glyphs for the letters
| are sourced from a version of the font that was intentionally
| created to steal someone else's font work because the whole
| font file is in the document.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >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.
| thih9 wrote:
| 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.
| pelagic_sky wrote:
| Very early in my design education (late 90's) I was taught that
| fonts are fonts and the more you have, the better you tool set
| would be. As a graphic designer I definitely made things with
| fonts I had downloaded. It wasn't till I got my first serious
| design job at an agency where I quickly learned about purchasing
| and licensing fonts. Even if I could "find" a missing font, I
| wasn't allowed to use it. We needed to get the fonts directly
| from the vendor we were working with and if they were being too
| slow, we ate the cost and purchased the font.
| wildzzz wrote:
| It's even harder to get away with pirating fonts now with web
| fonts. Either the service can detect you pulling a font for a
| domain that isn't paying for it or webcrawlers will find unpaid
| fonts.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Either the service can detect you pulling a font for a
| domain that isn't paying for it...
|
| Is that really a thing? Markup in a web page tells how to
| display the text. Saying "use this font over here on this
| other server" seems fair game on some level. Might not be on
| another level, but it's technically the end user downloading
| a file that's publicly available on some server.
| haneefmubarak wrote:
| AIUI the font vendor has a list of customers, each of whom
| are required to provide an exact list of the domains they
| will host it on and the domains they will display it on. So
| the crawlers, upon identifying a matching font, simply have
| to check that both the displaying and hosting domains
| match.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| "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.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| The moral background for copyright is in free fall these days.
|
| It is quickly turning into one of these things that there are
| laws for, and everyone thinks it is rediculous, it is never
| enforced and DE facto not a law.
|
| And what a shame that is.
| samspot wrote:
| Copyright, and patents, are not based on moral principles. It's
| a temporary government license meant to encourage innovation
| and hustle. Whether it works or not, I don't know. But the only
| question of morality is if it's immoral to break an arbitrary
| law, or not.
| themusicgod1 wrote:
| 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
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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).
| Suppafly wrote:
| >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.
| jll29 wrote:
| 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.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> What saddens me is that a lot of people are so ignorant that
| they don't even realize a font is something that takes
| creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort to design.
|
| I get that an average computer user who just views content
| might not. But as soon as you start creating stuff and even
| searching for and downloading a font you like I'd think some
| kind of mental bell would ring like "oh, these are a thing.
| Like some type of commodity."
| RussianCow wrote:
| 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.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| I remember trying to explain to some colleagues why I paid
| about 100 bucks for the font I use and why I wouldn't share it
| with them and they just couldn't get it.
|
| (It's Berkeley mono).
|
| I don't even know how many glyphs it is (it's thousands) but
| for something I'm looking at for 6-8 hours a day, every single
| day and is the absolute peak of perfection (at least to me),
| 100 bucks seems like a fucking bargain to me.
|
| _shrug_ I guess these folks never sold something they made
| completely by themselves maybe.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >shrug I guess these folks never sold something they made
| completely by themselves maybe.
|
| Not saying font designers shouldn't get paid, but they mostly
| aren't making things "completely by themselves", they are
| mostly making derivative works from things that exist,
| without any consideration for the original authors.
| kccqzy wrote:
| What do you suppose they should do to the original authors?
| Perhaps the original author is Claude Garamond who died in
| the sixteenth century? Or the unknown workers who carved
| the inscription at Trajan's column in the second century
| AD?
| Suppafly wrote:
| So you understand the issue, it's derivative works all
| the way down.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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.
| homebrewer wrote:
| 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.
| ..
| wyager wrote:
| What percentage of monospace text on the internet uses
| random obscure glyphs? This isn't really a practical
| problem.
| neilpanchal wrote:
| Hey, Berkeley Mono supports most Western European
| languages, can you tell me what's missing? I can add it.
| Btw, the tagline is about the aesthetics. :)
| testing1235 wrote:
| Hi Neil, I'm not that person you replied to but in my
| projects I require Cyrillic glyphs for Russian and
| Ukrainian texts. Also when checking out your website just
| now, I wasn't able to add a Berkeley Mono App License
| module in your ordering system. I assume I need a App
| License to embed the font in my app? But I also can't
| seem to find any information about the app license itself
| on your site as well.
| neilpanchal wrote:
| Cyrillic is not supported so Berkeley Mono might not be
| suitable for your application. Are you building a Web app
| (Webfonts) or a Desktop/Mobile app (App license)? Please
| email me.
| jmwilson wrote:
| The lack of the ohm symbol O is also quite a bummer given
| the technical domain of the font.
| neilpanchal wrote:
| Agree, I need to work on the full greek glyphset.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Is it a mistake, on page 4 of the linked datasheet, that
| "SemiBold" is shown for two different weights? I can't
| help but think that something like "DemiBold" was what
| the lighter weight was supposed to be labeled.
| neilpanchal wrote:
| Yes, that's a typo. Need to redo the entire datasheet and
| possibly find a way to automate it using reportlab or
| some other PDF library. Right now, it is in InDesign and
| it is a pain to keep updating it.
| tiagod wrote:
| I've been using Typst to generate PDF reports and it's
| pretty nice.
| jmb99 wrote:
| > _shrug_ I guess these folks never sold something they made
| completely by themselves maybe
|
| Ignoring that they likely didn't make it completely by
| themselves (standing on the shoulders of giants and such),
| it's quite possible that those people don't believe that a
| file should cost money. I've made a few things as close to
| "completely by myself" as possible and given them away for
| free, and those were physical objects - I lose it when I give
| it away! I have absolutely no problem giving away 1s and 0s
| for free, I can make as many copies of the original as I want
| with no additional effort.
|
| Of course we don't live in a world where everyone can follow
| their passions without needing money in return for sharing
| the result with the world, so it's fully understandable
| people want to sell their art. It's disingenuous and
| reductive to assume that anyone who doesn't want to pay for
| art has never made anything completely by themselves, though.
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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.
| gus_massa wrote:
| > _Berkeley Mono_
|
| Link for the lazy https://neil.computer/notes/berkeley-mono-
| font-variant-popul...
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| 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.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| 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.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >What saddens me is that a lot of people are so ignorant that
| they don't even realize a font is something that takes
| creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort to design.
|
| Except most of the creative part was done 100 years ago and
| companies are now trying to protect the fact that they
| digitized something that has existed for a century or longer.
| codedokode wrote:
| Not every font is digitized from old samples.
| Suppafly wrote:
| They are still mostly derivative works in basically every
| sense.
| Fraterkes wrote:
| Confidently asserted obvious falsehood
| Lerc wrote:
| 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.
| temporallobe wrote:
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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".
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| 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
| williamguerra wrote:
| 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...
| jchw wrote:
| 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.
| ndiddy wrote:
| It is related. The font file contains the text "Copyright 1996
| Catapult Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved". I'm not sure
| where it comes from because the SNES/Genesis/Saturn versions of
| the service didn't use it. Maybe it comes from the short-lived
| PC XBAND service?
| jchw wrote:
| > 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
| phony-account wrote:
| 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.
| lgiordano_notte wrote:
| font licensing feels like it never caught up with how software
| actually gets made now. charging more for app use than for mass
| print always seemed backwards, especially when indie devs are
| scraping by and a font costs more than your backend. no wonder
| people end up using "free alternatives" without looking too
| hard at where they came from.
| nickff wrote:
| I am of the opinion that the licenses for fonts in software
| are too expensive, but why is the pricing 'backwards'? Book
| publishers don't make a lot of profit, while software
| developers do.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| > Book publishers don't make a lot of profit, while
| software developers do.
|
| Do you have a citation for that?
|
| Printing a book costs just about nothing, it's
| astonishingly cheap to print a quality book in volume.
| Author royalties are not that high (I suppose famous
| authors whose name alone sell books is another story), then
| you have retail margins and overhead.
|
| The top three book publishers' have sales in the low
| billions with operating margins in the 10 - 20% range.
|
| It is a healthy industry even if it is smaller than it used
| to be.
|
| The one problem with books is that shipping an individual
| book to a single consumer costs a far more than printing
| the book, but there is zero shipping and zero printing
| costs for ebooks, just the retailer margin.
| hinkley wrote:
| Book publishing is at least as bad as VC work. You
| publish a lot of books to have a catalog, and a few books
| make inordinately more money than the rest which keeps
| the lights on. New printings sound cheap enough, but a
| lot of books don't get many of those. The long tail is
| very flat.
|
| And as for the authors, most would make a lot more money
| tutoring for the same number of hours of effort they put
| into the book. Those appearance fees might make it
| better, but how many people get those?
| indrora wrote:
| Short answer: Nobody fucking knows because the accounting
| is more non-GAAP than your typical investment fraud
| house.
|
| A few spots for folks interested in some amount of
| numbers:
|
| https://slate.com/culture/2024/04/book-sales-publishing-
| indu...
|
| https://archive.is/nGY6D
|
| https://janefriedman.com/book-pl/
| worik wrote:
| > while software developers do.
|
| Ouch!
|
| What is wrong with me then?
| gorgoiler wrote:
| 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.
| wyager wrote:
| I haven't bought a ton of fonts, but iirc the licensing from US
| Graphics was pretty reasonable for software distribution. It
| was something like an extra $200 for app usage for an indie
| developer.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| A diffusion model for fonts. Isn't it time they get ripped off
| too? /SARCASM
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43776539
| refulgentis wrote:
| 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"
| jsheard wrote:
| 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).
| lifesaverluke wrote:
| Got a link to such a service?
| jsheard wrote:
| https://www.fontradar.com is one. They also claim to
| analyze apps somehow.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| How robust is that identification? Does it just look for
| file hashes or identical character shapes? I imagine it is
| trivial to repackage a font file to break the hash
| fingerprint.
| grishka wrote:
| 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.
| zeroq wrote:
| And god forbid you to accidently ship the font with your game
| or mobile app! :)
| grishka wrote:
| How does one even use a font in an app without shipping it
| with the app? In a logo or something?
| tecleandor wrote:
| You can trace it, I guess...
| tptacek wrote:
| 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
| Hermes. Just don't shop at Hermes.
| gkoberger wrote:
| 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Modern included fonts aren't that bad. It's more like using
| tomato sauce instead of fancy handmade chilli.
|
| Your meal doesn't deeply suffer, it's just a bit bland.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Branding is very important.
|
| Branding requires being distinctive, mixing novel visual
| and other aspects in a pleasing way.
|
| As far as I have been able to tell no major platform
| ships with the universal font of fonts (full coverage of
| all possible fonts with 4.5Mb seed) "AnyStyleYouWant"
| font.
|
| And none of the fonts they do ship have the "distinctive"
| feature.
|
| Until that day comes...
| hattmall wrote:
| And importantly... Just like with food, the overwhelming
| majority of people will not notice at all.
|
| Even trained wine tasters can't tell the difference
| between cheap and expensive wine reliably.
|
| Normal people can't even tell what flavor of skittle they
| are eating without the visual color cue.
| fmbb wrote:
| There are roughly zero apps out there that would "deeply
| suffer" from having to use freely available and/or system
| supported fonts.
| gkoberger wrote:
| That's not true at all. You think games would feel as
| immersive if everything was Calibri? Magazine-style
| articles would feel as tactile if they all used the same
| system fonts? Etc.
|
| You may not care about fonts, but to say they don't
| matter is a misunderstanding. For example, I could glibly
| say we only need one programming language (the user
| doesn't care what syntax you used before it was compiled
| down to 1s and 0s!), but any engineer would make the case
| why that's not true at all.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| I admire your passion, but... as someone who is not
| deeply interested in fonts, I view them in largely
| functional terms. Can I read it? Does it look ok?
|
| Programming language choice has an aesthetic side, but it
| is also very much a functional concern. Can I write
| secure code? Will it be performant? Will it be
| maintainable?
|
| Different languages represent different functional
| tradeoffs. Are fonts really the same kind of thing? IOW,
| how would you make a choice between using Arial vs.
| Helvetica?
| gkoberger wrote:
| Arial v Helvetica is interesting, because Arial was
| designed basically as a cost-efficient alternative to
| Helvetica... here we are yet again at licensing! They are
| metrically compatible... meaning, the character widths
| and spaces are exact same. This means that switching to
| Arial won't affect the layout of your document. This was
| more important when things were more analog, but it's
| still important with digital documents: for example, it
| could mess up the number of pages, which would affect
| meta content or create line breaks that seem meaningful
| but aren't. Additionally, having things like a widow (a
| word by itself on a new line) can disrupt the visual flow
| and draw focus to or away from content in ways you don't
| desire.
|
| You mentioned security. If you look at this, 0 and O are
| (for me at least) very different... the zero has a slash
| through it. In other fonts, they're the same. While it's
| a stylistic choice often, in many situations the two
| characters would be indistinguishable, which is why
| someone might choose a typeface where characters are
| significantly different. For other uses, the slash in the
| 0 might become a distraction or signify the wrong thing.
|
| If you know your font will be used in a quite small size,
| you may want one that is optimized for being read at tiny
| sizes. If you're trying to make people feel at ease, you
| may want typeface where the end of the strokes are
| rounded. If you're displaying something technical, a
| monowidth font is right.
|
| And all of this focused on utility for the most part; I'm
| leaving out all the reasons you'd want it for stylistic
| reasons. Sometimes you want people to feel a certain way,
| in the same way you modulate your tone when talking.
| nogridbag wrote:
| Avatar was pretty immersive! And they just did Select-All
| and chose Papyrus!
| gkoberger wrote:
| They updated it for the sequel, and one example doesn't
| nullify thousands of years of design.
|
| But to go down that path from a logical standpoint...
| Papyrus isn't on my computer (OSX) for whatever reason,
| and it doesn't come on Linux. Papyrus isn't a free,
| public font... it's licensed by its owner (ITC), so the
| only reason you can use it on your computer is because
| someone is paying a license for you to see it.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| >You think games would feel as immersive if everything
| was Calibri?
|
| What computer are you buying that only has one font?
| There are dozens of fonts, covering all kinds of styles,
| on every desktop sold.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Is your point weakened by the fact that there is not one
| freely available font to use commercially, but literally
| thousands?
| gkoberger wrote:
| I guess it comes down to how you view the concept of "the
| medium is the message". Should the tone be set by the
| creator of the software / writer of the blog post / etc,
| or should the end user choose one typeface for everything
| (or have fine-grained control over everything they read
| and view?)
| babypuncher wrote:
| My problem with this analogy is that there are dozens if
| not hundreds of free typefaces that _are_ exceptionally
| high quality and have stood the test of time.
|
| The "problem" with free typefaces isn't their quality, it's
| their ubiquity. Since everyone can use them, they are used
| everywhere. Licensing something less common can help your
| product stand out from the crowd.
| bigiain wrote:
| So "Typefaces are incredibly important", just not important
| enough to pay for (or create yourself)???
| gkoberger wrote:
| The OP didn't say they didn't want to pay, they're saying
| there's been a shift toward per-impression pricing which
| is often unsustainable for even the most lucrative apps.
| lolinder wrote:
| Even under this analogy you're complaining about the price
| of luxury goods and saying that it's no wonder people
| shoplift to steal the truffles because they're so darn
| expensive.
|
| If you can't afford the license for the font, your app is
| small-time enough that you can make do with one of the
| many, many high-quality fonts that are available for free,
| there's no need to pirate it. If your app is big enough
| that the difference matters, then you can likely afford the
| sticker price.
| gkoberger wrote:
| No, I'm saying a Michelin chef can complain about a 50x
| increase in the cost of truffles without negating the
| fact that a lot of people happily survive on ramen.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| Hermes doesn't forbid you from wearing your watch or charge
| 10x more for you to wear it while playing a mobile game.
|
| I think a lot of the anger is more about the complexity and
| price discrimination than the absolute price.
| luckylion wrote:
| Do you consider fonts largely useless, overpriced and
| primarily directed at customers who seek to display status
| symbols? Because that's the analogy, I'm sure I agree.
|
| But the prices are off the charts, and it's the usual
| private-equity buying up the competition & their IP and then
| squeezing as much as they can. Not sure why that's worth
| rooting for.
| al_borland wrote:
| 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.
| nativeit wrote:
| 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.
| pier25 wrote:
| I only purchase fonts for graphic design projects (mostly
| branding). For UIs I'm perfectly happy with Google Fonts.
| mrkeen wrote:
| They stole the music too.
|
| Anti-pirating ad music stolen [2013]:
| https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/01/29/3678851.h...
| shadowgovt wrote:
| If one didn't know better, one could conclude the history of
| this ad campaign suggests it was performance art done by
| creatives ideologically opposed to the client.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| 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).
| albedoa wrote:
| 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...
| cosmotic wrote:
| Looks like the wikipedia page needs a bit of updating
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Wouldn%27t_Steal_a_Car
| locallost wrote:
| Off-topic, but with this ad I always think of the IT Crowd spoof
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| 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_...
| rglover wrote:
| 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.
| anonym29 wrote:
| "Entity that conducts IP theft whines about IP theft"... just
| like OpenAI whining about Deepseek distillation...
|
| Remember kids: information wants to be free!
| nla wrote:
| Bought the Adobe Font Folio -- TWICE.
|
| Now, every single font in the font folio is free with a
| $30./month Adobe sub.
| nativeit wrote:
| > ...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.
| nativeit wrote:
| This comment section is precisely what I expected upon
| discovering this very funny anecdote regarding the irony and
| hypocrisy involved with the infamous anti-piracy advocacy of the
| late '90's/early '00s. Peak HN--didactic, humorless, and lost in
| its own takes about the absolute least relevant detail of the
| story: font licensing.
|
| This sounds very critical, but I assure you, these are my people.
| I rather find it very reassuring, even a little charming.
|
| Don't ever change HN.
| gred wrote:
| 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).
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