[HN Gopher] You wouldn't steal a font
___________________________________________________________________
You wouldn't steal a font
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 1312 points
Date : 2025-04-23 19:42 UTC (1 days 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.
| akho wrote:
| Like, the actual lead type?
| 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.
| Aloisius wrote:
| You can't copyright the name of a font in the US. You can
| trademark it.
| weinzierl wrote:
| In the 90s Corel Draw came with a Helvetica named Swiss.
| Microsoft wasn't as bold and called theirs Arial.
| Gormo wrote:
| Corel's "Swiss" font is identical to Helvetica. Arial has
| many differences.
| devmor wrote:
| > In the US you can't copyright the shape of a font. You
| can copyright the programmatic description of a font.
|
| The organization in question is a UK organization, and
| you can in fact copyright a font in the UK. The US is
| unrelated to this issue.
| 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
| raincole wrote:
| So if I already have the file (legally acquired or not),
| I'm free to use it for print? Cause obviously
| distributing T-shirts isn't distributing font files?
| Gormo wrote:
| In the US, yes.
| colechristensen wrote:
| It depends on if it has a design patent on it or not.
| 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.
| s4i wrote:
| We don't know what the ads (meaning, the videos) used. We
| only know what was on their website.
| 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.)
| pc86 wrote:
| "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.
| WillAdams wrote:
| 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.
| pc86 wrote:
| I'm not saying it's never possible in any case, just that
| in cases where it's not you can't prove infringement.
| 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.
| usefulcat wrote:
| Trademark and copyright are not the same thing..
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Trademark != copyright.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| T-Mobile does not have a trademark on the color magenta,
| nor does Pantone on any colors.
|
| The trademark is for using that color to market your
| product such that a buyer might assume they are buying
| T-mobile, but in reality they are not.
|
| Or for Pantone, that a buyer is buying a color quality
| controlled by Pantone.
| 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
| snypher wrote:
| >Under the Feist ruling in the US, mere collections of
| facts are considered unoriginal and thus not protected by
| copyright, no matter how much work went into collating
| them.
|
| This person isn't just collecting existing letter shapes;
| inventing a new letter shapes would be protected by
| copyright?
| ars wrote:
| You aren't inventing a new letter shapes - letters
| already exist. You are modifying how they look, and
| that's not considered creative enough.
|
| There are lots of things that can't be copyrighted.
|
| For example you can't copyright an anatomy drawing:
| https://www.skeletaldrawing.com/licensing (i.e. the
| layout of the bones, etc) but you can copyright your
| specific drawing - but someone else could draw in the
| same style and not violate your copyright.
|
| Same here: You can't copyright the shape of the letters,
| but you can copyright you specific ttf program
| (expression), but someone else can make the same letter
| shapes if they want.
| codedokode wrote:
| You can say the same about drawing of a cat: you are not
| inventing new animal here. But for some weird reason cats
| are copyrighted and letters are not.
|
| There are many ways to draw the same letter, as there are
| many ways to draw a cat.
|
| Also if one draws letters that look like cats, will they
| fall under copyright protection?
| ars wrote:
| If someone draws a cat, and the next person draws
| basically the same cat, there is no copyright
| infringement.
|
| You need something "extra", some kind of style that is
| distinct.
|
| I'm not saying your drawing has no copyright - it does,
| if someone reproduces it exactly that's illegal. I'm
| saying if someone makes the same type of drawing, in the
| same style, that's not infringement - even if they looked
| at yours, as long as they drew it themselves.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > inventing a new letter shapes would be protected by
| copyright?
|
| It is settled law that letter shapes aren't
| copyrightable. Period.
| pc86 wrote:
| Who are you paying for a 400-year old font? Who _deserves_
| to get paid for a 400-year old font?
| rafram wrote:
| They _are_ computer programs. Not sure why you'd crudely
| insult the judge for saying that.
| echoangle wrote:
| Are fonts really programs? Is a digital image file also a
| program?
|
| A font file is more like a config that's used by your OS to
| render something, there's no real interactivity in fonts
| (except some ligatures but those are just static tables,
| right?).
| djfivyvusn wrote:
| Yes. And they're also copyrightable.
|
| That's why this shit is so stupid.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Many things are copyrightable that shouldn't be. When you
| can spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress to get
| them to extend copyright protections beyond reason, that
| tends to happen.
|
| In the United States, it is settled precedent that
| typefaces are not copyrightable. That doesn't change just
| because they became digital in 1984.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Fonts aren't just programs, they can contain and run an
| entire AI model to give you access to an LLM in any
| program running Harfbuzz:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40766791
|
| I would say that counts as interactivity.
| rafram wrote:
| TrueType, which has been around since the 80s, includes a
| full Turing-complete instruction set for hinting:
| https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-Reference-
| Manual/...
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| This is sophistry. Does anyone write apps in ttf? Can I
| download a calendar app? Has anyone even cranked out some
| proof of concept?
|
| Fonts aren't software in any meaningful sense of the
| word.
| rafram wrote:
| We're talking about copyright here. A typeface on its own
| isn't copyrightable. The judge ruled that turning a
| typeface into a digital font involves writing a
| nontrivial computer program, which is a creative work
| under US copyright law. That simply is true. It doesn't
| matter whether you can write "apps" in TrueType; you can
| write digital fonts in it.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html
| nailer wrote:
| 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...
| Thorrez wrote:
| 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...
| nailer wrote:
| Melchior Rietveldt's work was for a different antipiracy ad
|
| https://torrentfreak.com/sorry-the-you-wouldnt-steal-a-
| car-a...
| 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
| socalgal2 wrote:
| A popular response
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4
| 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.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| But was Xband created by copying the math from FF
| Confidential?
| 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.
| Macha wrote:
| In fact many PDFs still do convert the text to shapes
| rather than use the font. It does cause problems when you
| need to copy text out though
| shadowgovt wrote:
| You could. But in a thousand page document, that's a lot of
| memory used up to record a vector for every letter 'c'. So
| of course you do two layers: record modifiers and
| transforms on a canonical 'c', and then keep a canonical
| 'c' somewhere with all the other letters.
|
| ... But you already have that data structure: it's the font
| file itself.
|
| (Possibly worth noting here also is that historically,
| Adobe owned both the PDF format and the file format for
| most popular fonts. So they were heavily incentivized to
| just reuse code they already owned here instead of
| reinventing a wheel).
| Suppafly wrote:
| > that's a lot of memory used up to record a vector for
| every letter 'c'.
|
| only if you do things in the dumbest way possible.
| 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.
| hackingonempty wrote:
| In the USA at least, contributory and vicarious
| infringement are a thing. Grokster knowingly directed their
| users to infringing material so they picked up secondary
| liability.
| 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.
| badmintonbaseba wrote:
| An allow-list would probably suck for local development for
| users that do have a valid license.
| akho wrote:
| A downloadable file can be hosted elsewhere.
| 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
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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.
| int_19h wrote:
| A law claiming that something is a "moral right" doesn't
| make it so, though.
|
| Just as e.g. sodomy laws claiming that something is immoral
| doesn't make it so.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I'd agree with this.
|
| The point I was addressing was whether or not copyright
| is grounded in moral rights, and as my earlier response
| notes, it depends on jurisdiction and foundations.
|
| That said, I've come to a general view that moralising of
| pathologies or other behaviours is often highly
| counterproductive. Medicine progressed little when
| illness, disease, or dysfunction were rationalised as
| will of gods or divine retribution. Germ theory and other
| causal etiologies broke that dam. Left-handedness was
| widely viewed as literally malevolent, a sign of the
| devil. Which did little to prevent the condition, and
| greatly hampered opportunities and life-paths of the
| roughly 10% of the population which is left handed.
| Oppression of LGBTQIX+ individuals is often presented as
| a similar situation. Mental health and illness still
| carry strong moralising-of-pathology overtones, though
| the situation's improving. Justice and penal systems are
| presented by some as another such case (see in particular
| Robert Sapolsky).
|
| Back to copyright and patent: _both_ foundations,
| authorial /inventor support _and_ moral rights strike me
| as grossly flawed in both grounding and consequence.
| 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).
| phlakaton wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| All law is a fiction, by that argument.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Just because it's a fiction doesn't meant it's not
| effective in triggering human responses and proactive
| actions. In a broad sense, fiction is all we get as human
| minds, whether it's representative representation of our
| actual embedding universe or not.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| That would in fact be part of my argument.
|
| Some fictions are readily dispensible. Most are not.
|
| What they are _not_ however is laws of nature, divine
| right or revelation, or immutable.
|
| Limit on the law-of-nature bit: law is often a _highly
| probable outcome_ of various power dynamics, political,
| economic, social, cultural, etc.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >All law is a fiction, by that argument.
|
| sure but some can claim more of a moral basis than others.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Beware claims to moral rights / superiority. They're
| often a thought-stopping wedge to badness.
|
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43782745>
| tossandthrow wrote:
| 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.
| Kiro wrote:
| Piracy is not the reason individual authors cannot feed
| themselves.
| int_19h wrote:
| All abstract property rights are legal fiction. The notion
| that you can own, say, a piece of land that you have never
| even came close to, simply by virtue of a record in some
| registry somewhere; and, based on that ownership, then
| restrict the ability of others who actually _do_ live next to
| it to enter it or otherwise use it, is rather absurd from a
| "natural right" perspective.
|
| I should note that this isn't even some kind of hot new take.
| Here's what Thomas Jefferson had to say on the subject:
|
| "It is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of
| property is derived from nature at all... It is agreed by
| those who have seriously considered the subject that no
| individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an
| acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed,
| whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men
| equally and in common is the property for the moment of him
| who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the
| property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social
| law, and is given late in the progress of society."
|
| "A right of property in moveable things is admitted before
| the establishment of government. A separate property in
| lands, not till after that establishment. The right to
| moveables is acknowledged by all the hordes of Indians
| surrounding us. Yet by no one of them has a separate property
| in lands been yielded to individuals. He who plants a field
| keeps possession till he has gathered the produce, after
| which one has as good a right as another to occupy it.
| Government must be established and laws provided, before
| lands can be separately appropriated, and their owner
| protected in his possession. Till then, the property is in
| the body of the nation, and they, or their chief as trustee,
| must grant them to individuals, and determine the conditions
| of the grant."
| popcalc wrote:
| Blame the current wave of rentier capitalism. Pioneered by
| SaaS. The funds like the one behind this site played a role in
| the acceleration.
| 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.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| When people say "make completely by themselves", they
| don't mean that were not influenced by _literally_ no
| prior works. Artists can say they painted an original
| work entirely by themselves without needing a pedant to
| mention that they were probably influenced by prior work.
| jzacharia wrote:
| at a high enough level of abstraction, all creative work
| is derivative. wouldn't call it an "issue"
| Suppafly wrote:
| >at a high enough level of abstraction, all creative work
| is derivative.
|
| Sure, but with fonts you have basically one level between
| the font they are 'developing' and the one they are
| copying from. There is work involved, but very little of
| it is creative work.
| mikey_p wrote:
| Clearly nothing based on Latin script can be original,
| which itself is based on the Etruscan Old italic
| alphabet, which itself it based on the Euboean alphabet
| -- ergo, any typeface developed after say the 8th century
| BC is just a silly derivative.
|
| Everything is derivative, there is nothing new under the
| sun, and your argument proves nothing.
| 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.
| scripturial wrote:
| Pretty much anyone coding in another language. Coders do
| sometimes buy fonts if they are into fonts and nice
| terminals.
| 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.
| scripturial wrote:
| If you could remember to include Ancient Greek (pre 1980)
| accent combinations that would be awesome. It's not that
| many extra accents.
|
| (Many Greek fonts today don't draw the accents and
| breathings that are used in older texts)
| 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...
| snypher wrote:
| And ofc there was a HN discussion;
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38322793
| edm0nd wrote:
| how does that work? you set this font to be used by all your
| computers and devices?
| 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
| unclad5968 wrote:
| It's not obvious to me. Could you explain what makes
| fonts non-derivative?
| Fraterkes wrote:
| In what way are fonts derivative that doesn't apply to
| everything else that is created?
| lawn wrote:
| This broad generalization can apply to any creative
| endeavor such as music, movies, books, and TV series you
| know?
| 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
| speerer wrote:
| 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/...
| jchw wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Bizarrely, it seems like the precedent has only gotten
| stronger since 1987. It was re-affirmed again by the Code of
| Federal Regulations, SS 202.1[1], in 1992. Honestly, I don't
| fully understand why. I know that U.S. copyright law
| generally limits the ability to copyright things that do not
| involve sufficient originality or creativity, but while all
| typeface outlines are the same basic shapes, there's still
| plenty of room for creativity.
|
| I also know that the U.S. is also not entirely alone in
| generally considering typefaces ineligible for copyright
| protection; I believe Japan also has a similar position.
| Maybe eventually, it will shift.
|
| > 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.
|
| Oh, I honestly didn't even realize FACT was a UK
| organization; I didn't really know a whole lot about them
| other than the commercial.
|
| That makes this situation a bit more awkward, as Catapult
| was, IIRC, based in Cupertino, so Catapult may have not been
| breaking any U.S. copyright laws, even though their typeface
| would presumably be illicit by UK law. That said, they were
| possibly breaking Dutch copyright laws, and I'm not sure what
| happens there. I suppose that comes down to the nitty gritty
| of how international copyright treaties work, and I am way
| out of my depth there.
|
| [1]: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-37/chapter-
| II/subchapter-...
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| SoMomentary wrote:
| I had this happen to a client and even though they had both
| the web and print licenses they were hit with a 50k suite
| because the font file was malformed somehow. I'm not sure
| how it shook out but I hope they didn't pay a god damn
| cent.
| 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.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > I wouldn't try my luck with any non-free fonts made by
| Russian designers.
|
| Depends if your home country cares about Russian civil
| court or not.
| fooker wrote:
| Huh, this is interesting. Given that Russia has been the
| hub of internet piracy for theast three decades.
| grishka wrote:
| That's because copyright in Russia is only enforced for
| companies. If you pirate something for personal use, no
| one would care, thankfully.
| 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...
| whstl wrote:
| What if you convert it to bitmap, instead of shipping a
| TTF/WOFF/etc? Does it still counts as shipping the
| font... or not?
| bluescrn wrote:
| And if you generate a set of bitmaps/sprites of
| individual glyphs from the font (e.g. to use as a bitmap
| font in a game), is that different to shipping an image
| with more specific uses of the font baked in, e.g. a
| logo/title image?
| trinix912 wrote:
| No, because a font is licensed as a computer program that
| generates those glyphs. The glyphs themselves aren't
| copyrightable.
| int_19h wrote:
| By using a font that is guaranteed to be provided by the
| system on which the app is running. Both Windows, macOS,
| iOS, and Android all make such guarantees.
|
| Linux DEs generally don't, but perhaps they should, given
| that open fonts with decent quality and extensive coverage
| are out there. Something like the Noto family.
| 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...
| int_19h wrote:
| Please keep your "branding" out of my UI. What I want
| from text in the apps I use is legibility first and
| foremost, not them screaming the brand at me every second
| I'm staring at them.
| 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 an interesting example, because
| Arial was designed basically as a cost-efficient
| alternative to Helvetica. So, the reason you'd choose
| between the two is exactly the thing the original comment
| was complaining about - licensing! They were designed to
| be metrically compatible... meaning, the character widths
| and spaces are exactly the 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.
|
| But just because those two typefaces are quite similar
| (and the reason to pick between them is largely
| financial/convenience) doesn't mean you'd never want to
| have more fine-grained control over the text you're
| working with.
|
| You mentioned security. When I'm editing this comment, 0
| and O are very different (the zero has a slash through
| it), however when I hit save they look quite similar.
| (But because we're all using system fonts on HN, it might
| be different for you). While it's often just a stylistic
| choice, in many situations the two characters would be
| indistinguishable and that would be an issue, which is
| why someone might choose a typeface where characters are
| significantly different. Think a password you have to
| transcribe.
|
| 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 displaying something technical, a
| monowidth font is better suited.
|
| 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. If you're trying to make people feel at ease,
| you may want typeface where the end of the strokes are
| rounded, for example. Sometimes you want people to feel a
| certain way, in the same way you modulate your tone when
| talking.
| tptacek wrote:
| Yes. Arial is bad. But Microsoft shifted away from Arial
| more than 20 years ago.
| 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.
| wubrr wrote:
| There are literally thousands of free font out there
| available for download.
| nogridbag wrote:
| I don't have a strong opinion here. I was only making a
| silly reference to the SNL skit :)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ
| 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.
| vFunct wrote:
| Very few system fonts are any good. Would you use Arial
| instead of Helvetica Neue? I certainly wouldn't. Put two
| posters side-by-side and you'd notice the Helvetica one
| as looking more professional, even without any design
| background.
|
| Additionally, very few system fonts include all the
| weights. Fonts aren't just come in a single weight. The
| font you use for a giant page-filling title is generally
| skinnier than the font used for a caption.
|
| Good design creates a reaction, such as causing you to
| buy something or interacting more with something or
| whatever, even for people that say they don't care about
| design.
|
| Designers know you better than you know yourself.
| wubrr wrote:
| > Very few system fonts are any good.
|
| An obviously false statement which you can't possibly
| back up.
|
| > Would you use Arial instead of Helvetica Neue? I
| certainly wouldn't. Put two posters side-by-side and
| you'd notice the Helvetica one as looking more
| professional, even without any design background.
|
| First of all that's just completely your own subjective
| opinion. Second, there are many other free sans-serif
| fonts out there to choose from (examples[1]).
|
| > Good design creates a reaction, such as causing you to
| buy something or interacting more with something or
| whatever
|
| 'Design' can encompass many things, but can you show me
| some data that backs up your claim that slight
| differences in fonts will make a difference in product
| quality/performance/revenue/etc? Because I have seen a
| loooot of data that says it's almost always completely
| irrelevant.
|
| [1] https://fonts.google.com/?categoryFilters=Sans+Serif:
| %2FSans...
| tptacek wrote:
| This is just clearly wrong. Even Georgia and Verdana are
| very serious works of typography. The Cleartype fonts
| hold their own against modern text faces. San Francisco
| and New York are also obviously strong fonts. These are
| gigantic companies that take typography seriously, they
| can easily afford to invest in competent system fonts,
| and they both obviously have.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Apple has been shipping systems with various weights of
| Helvetica Neue forever.
| https://developer.apple.com/fonts/system-fonts/
| 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?)
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't think this makes much sense as an argument,
| because you can have it either way with the status quo.
| The question isn't whether creators can use typesetting
| expressively; they clearly can, with a degree of freedom
| and optionality that would have blown me away when I
| started font nerding back in the 1990s. The question is
| whether I should sympathize with designers who are
| irritated by the licensing terms for Gotham or Brandon
| Grotesque (or whomever is doing per-impression licensing
| these days). I do not, and I think I'm on solid ground.
| wubrr wrote:
| How is using some of the thousands of freely available
| fonts out there even remotely the same as using Calibri
| for everything?
|
| You're making absurd comparisons and not being sincere.
| gkoberger wrote:
| No, I think we're just looking at it from different
| perspectives.
|
| Yes, most people are fine choosing from the fonts
| available on their computer when writing a document.
|
| But that's not what me nor OP are talking about. We're
| talking about shipping software (like a mobile app), or
| publishing a blog post. In that case, the best you can
| specify is either a very common font (Helvetica, etc), or
| a high-level classification (serif, sans-serif, etc).
|
| There are many free fonts out there, yes, but there's a
| reason they're free. The quality for a majority of them
| is significantly lower, and many designs come with
| constraints (either utilitarian or stylistic). You don't
| have to agree, but I'm not being absurd or lacking
| sincerity.
|
| You're also just going around and commenting the same
| thing on each of my posts. But don't limit your
| understand to just my writing here; there's thousands of
| books about the importance of typography if you're
| curious to learn more.
| wubrr wrote:
| > There are many free fonts out there, yes, but there's a
| reason they're free.
|
| Go on and tell me what that reason is then. Are you also
| going to tell me free open-source software, like Linux is
| low-quality because its free?
|
| > The quality for a majority of them is significantly
| lower
|
| Again, a completely baseless, unprovable assertion.
|
| > You don't have to agree, but I'm not being absurd or
| lacking sincerity.
|
| What do you call your example of using Calibri for
| everything in response to someone suggesting the use of
| free fonts?
|
| You are lacking sincerity and making absurd claims.
| Almost everything else you say is literally baseless
| rhetoric that you are unable to back up with data or any
| objective argument.
|
| > there's thousands of books about the importance of
| typography if you're curious to learn more.
|
| It's amazing that you apparently know of thousands of
| such books, but are unable to make one coherent,
| objective argument to back up your claims.... did you
| read them?
| gkoberger wrote:
| I'm not going to argue with you, but I just want to point
| out that the person I was responding to specifically used
| the phrase "system supported fonts". That's why I
| mentioned Calibri.
| wubrr wrote:
| No, what the person you responded to said was:
|
| > '..freely available and/or system supported fonts.'
|
| Not just 'system supported fonts' (whatever that means),
| and not just Calibri. That's why your 'use Calibri for
| everything' example is absurd and does not at all address
| the point they made.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| The last sentence is the variety that is super tempting
| to make but counterproductive because it shuts down
| discussion or poisons it thereafter its made to impress
| bystanders not actually communicate with the person.
| wubrr wrote:
| Agree that it might not be the best, but seems like a
| fairly appropriate response for someone trying to back up
| their rhetoric with 'thousands of books out there'. How
| is it 'made to impress bystanders'?
| tptacek wrote:
| Who cares? They're part of a line of argumentation that
| dunks on the typography work of Matthew Carter. This is
| very much the same thing as a thread on industrial design
| dunking on Dieter Rams. You don't get angry at that kind
| of argument; you laugh at it.
| wubrr wrote:
| Oh I was never angry, I was enjoying the argument (maybe
| that makes me combative, oh well), and I was completely
| open to being proven wrong and thereby becoming more
| informed on the topic... alas...
| rondini wrote:
| You've been combative throughout this thread, and it's
| clear that you don't see typography or design as
| disciplines that warrant serious thought. I don't think
| you're actually willing to engage with an explanation of
| why it matters but I'll try anyway.
|
| System fonts are the absolute bottom of the barrel. Some
| are well designed but using any of them is a visual
| shorthand that you didn't care enough to put thought into
| your design. You're associating your product with the
| ocean of amateur work on the internet, giving the
| impression you copy pasted a template.
|
| There are some high quality free fonts typically backed
| by massive organizations with actual typographic
| expertise. Most free fonts however, are amateur work that
| are technically and functionally lacking. Professional
| fonts are well designed at all weights, they're carefully
| spaced, they include much larger character sets to
| support more languages, contain features like lining and
| non-lining figures, variable font weights, small caps...
| are those all slight differences?
|
| There's a reason so many articles exist with titles like
| "Google Fonts That Don't Suck". Most of them do. If you
| are a professional whose job requires working with type,
| then choosing a font is foundational to your product.
| Arguing that all design is BS is just lazy; it's not a
| coherent argument.
|
| I highly recommend practicaltypography.com, a _free_ web
| book that discusses all of this and more, including why
| system fonts are bad and why a professional typeface is
| worth paying for.
| tptacek wrote:
| This claim that system fonts are the "bottom of the
| barrel" is just so clearly false that I don't understand
| how you can be an advocate of typography and say it. Both
| Microsoft and Apple put huge amounts of effort into
| typography, contract or employ well-regarded designers,
| and their outputs are themselves well-regarded.
|
| If you wanted to say "most of what's on Google Fonts is
| bottom of the barrel", you'd have a colorable argument.
| But that isn't what you said.
| dwaite wrote:
| San Francisco is a great font. Arial is a perfectly
| functional semi-clone of Helvetica, Times New Roman is a
| decent interpretation of Plantin. Roboto is an
| interesting mash-up of Helvetica, DIN, and a few others.
|
| System font from a web standpoint means you get one of
| these depending on the user's choice of phone, desktop,
| and/or browser.
|
| It is somewhat like buying art because the frame covers a
| blemish on the wall. That the print inside the frame
| might be of a famous impressionist painting does not mean
| that the frame or the print necessarily go with the room.
|
| The car analogy involves a car rental place - that they
| may give you any one of several newish, functional and
| even stylish vehicles does not change that you may often
| wind up being paired with a vehicle mismatched for your
| function.
| tptacek wrote:
| Around the time Matthew Carter was creating Georgia, one
| of the most widely-used system fonts in the world, for
| Microsoft, he was also widely considered one of the best
| typographers in the world. Georgia is not hotel room wall
| art.
| dcow wrote:
| There are many laughably horrible attempts at fonts out
| there on free font sites (I remember my days learning to
| write software in the early 00s), sure. But there are
| also high quality professionally designed and typeset
| fonts available for free, including those of the system
| variety. The argument is comparing the latter to
| expensive designer fonts, not the former to high quality
| fonts.
| wubrr wrote:
| > You've been combative throughout this thread
|
| Disagreeing with you doesn't mean I'm combative. (Not
| that I care)
|
| > typography or design as disciplines that warrant
| serious thought.
|
| We are talking about fonts here, more specifically fonts
| used in software, more specifically the quality of free
| fonts used in software. Not 'design' as a whole which is
| much more than that.
|
| > System fonts are the absolute bottom of the barrel.
|
| If you say so.
|
| > You're associating your product with the ocean of
| amateur work on the internet, giving the impression you
| copy pasted a template.
|
| Reusing a font means you're copy-pasting your
| article/app/etc from a template? Erm ok.
|
| > There are some high quality free fonts typically backed
| by massive organizations with actual typographic
| expertise.
|
| 'Some'? Like 1000? 10000? How many fonts does one
| application need? 'typically'? How 'typically'? And I'm
| not being pedantic - your statements are pretty
| meaningless without actual numbers.
|
| > Professional fonts are well designed at all weights,
| they're carefully spaced, they include much larger
| character sets to support more languages, contain
| features like lining and non-lining figures, variable
| font weights, small caps... are those all slight
| differences?
|
| What is a 'Professional font'? lmao
|
| Plenty of free fonts have all of the features you've
| listed, and plenty of non-free fonts don't.
|
| > There's a reason so many articles exist with titles
| like "Google Fonts That Don't Suck". Most of them do.
|
| Again 'so many' and 'most'... you should provide specific
| (at least approximate) numbers, otherwise this says
| nothing about how many good free fonts are actually out
| there.
|
| > Arguing that all design is BS is just lazy
|
| Well I didn't say that, pretending that I did is pretty
| lazy tho.
|
| > I highly recommend practicaltypography.com, a free web
| book that discusses all of this and more, including why
| system fonts are bad and why a professional typeface is
| worth paying for.
|
| Oh geez! A FREE book which tells you why you should pay
| for 'professional' fonts while at the same time selling
| them to you with affiliate links! Thank you sir!
| tptacek wrote:
| You should care if you're being combatative, but, even
| more importantly, quoting previous comments the way
| you're doing doesn't work well on HN and is also a
| flamewar trope. Everybody can read the comments you're
| responding to. Just refer back to them in prose. A single
| quote, maybe 2 in a long comment, fine, but what you're
| doing now creates the impression that you're sort of
| rebutting what the previous commenter said as you read
| them, sentence by sentence, which is a tell that you're
| not actually thinking about what they said.
|
| Also: they're pretty clearly wrong, so you shouldn't need
| any of this to refute them.
| wubrr wrote:
| I am rebutting what the previous commenter said, sentence
| by sentence (almost), I don't know why that tells you
| that I'm not actually thinking about what they said
| though. Did I misunderstand or misrepresent something
| they said?
| gpvos wrote:
| Going against someone is not the same as rebutting, the
| quality of the argument counts.
| dcow wrote:
| Because it's easy to respond to one-off sentences. It's
| harder to respond to the substantial argument they make.
| II2II wrote:
| Something tells me that some designers care about fonts a
| heck of a lot more than most consumers do. As a consumer,
| I care about legibility above all else. There are plenty
| of metrics that affect that, but many of the freely
| available (albeit, not necessarily free) fonts are
| perfectly fine on that front. More bluntly, some of those
| freely available fonts are going to be better than the
| vast majority of fonts that you can pay for because: (a)
| companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have invested
| in their development or licensing to ensure their
| customers have access to high quality fonts with coverage
| for most languages; and (b) they have wide availability,
| since font substitution is going to have a much larger
| impact upon the perceived quality of a document than its
| use of quality fonts.
| joquarky wrote:
| Maybe this pedantic snobbery will matter again when we
| switch back to creative mode, but it all seems highly
| elitist right now while many are trying to just survive.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| If Avatar can use Papyrus, I think your apps are fine
| with common fonts.
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ
| tptacek wrote:
| Yes: I think games would be approximately as immersive as
| they are now if everything was set in Calibri. Also:
| Calibri is a very, very good typeface.
| jrflowers wrote:
| >That's not true at all.
|
| What specific iOS apps would suffer greatly by having to
| use the ~75 font families that come with the device? How
| would they suffer exactly?
|
| https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/List_of_fonts_included_w
| ith...
| joquarky wrote:
| Seriously. It amazes me what one person's sense of "deep
| suffering" is compared to another's.
|
| The Total Perspective Vortex comes to mind.
| 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.
| moron4hire wrote:
| Or you could try implementing good features to try to
| stand out from the crowd.
|
| Frankly, non-default fonts outside of the logo are a red
| flag to me. They signal a team that has put form so far
| over function that the function is almost guaranteed to
| not be fit for purpose.
| 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.
| bigiain wrote:
| So, using the OP's own comparison, I should be able to
| pay a one off "saffron purchase", and then be able to use
| as much saffron as I want from the supermarket for every
| meal I ever make in the future? ;-)
| gkoberger wrote:
| No, because Saffron is a physical commodity with inherent
| production costs, supply chain logistics, and a finite
| supply. A better analogy would be that if you bought a
| saffron crocus, you shouldn't have to pay a monthly fee
| to harvest it.
| tptacek wrote:
| This doesn't mean anything. Things are not generally sold
| at their bill of materials cost. If you don't want to pay
| what Monotype is charging, don't use Monotype faces. It's
| exactly that simple. There a gajillion alternative faces,
| and a very large number of them are of high quality.
| graemep wrote:
| > Things are not generally sold at their bill of
| materials cost
|
| In a perfectly competitive market things are sold at cost
| of production + a small markup.
| tptacek wrote:
| Do you understand what a perfectly competitive market is?
| Typefaces structurally cannot be one.
| 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.
| gobengo wrote:
| op isn't saying you shouldn't complain. op is saying you
| shouldn't steal instead of complaining
| gkoberger wrote:
| I think there's some confusion in who is responding to
| whom, then. I never said anything about piracy, but the
| person responding to me may have confused me with the
| top-level comment.
|
| All I have done is defend the importance of typography,
| and never mentioned piracy or stealing.
| dcow wrote:
| Typography is important. So important that we have really
| good looking fonts available for free. And a custom font
| isn't going to be the deciding factor in whether your
| next AI powered social graph app sinks or floats.
| Guaranteed.
| behringer wrote:
| Then why are the fonts so expensive?
| ghaff wrote:
| Because designers fuss a lot about nearly undetectable
| differences in color, fonts, and many other things. Maybe
| they make a difference in the aggregate. But if you can't
| identify the difference between Ariak and Helvetica (to
| pick a particularly glaring example) you're probably not
| one of those designers.
| biercarsten wrote:
| I agree. Many people can hardly tell the difference
| between Arial and Helvetica. There used to be a website
| where you could test how good you are at telling them
| apart.
|
| You won't notice many small differences between certain
| fonts. But that doesn't mean they're unnecessary. As you
| said, they make a difference when taken together. For
| screens, there are a number of adjustments and techniques
| that improve screen readability. Hinting, separate
| designs, contrast for low dpi and subpixel rendering
| compatibility, for example. At least some of the
| optimizations don't work out of the box, but have to be
| adjusted by designers. That's why it can happen that a
| font you bought for print media now requires an extra
| license for websites and apps.
|
| There are plenty of wonderfully readable fonts for the
| web and apps that are free and sufficient for most
| projects. If you want something special, I don't think
| it's wrong to pay for it. Personally, I would prefer more
| reasonable prices, though.
| mark-r wrote:
| USED to be a website? Aww, I did pretty well there -
| going to miss it.
| ummonk wrote:
| No idea which one it was but I found this one and got a
| perfect score. The difference is pretty obvious...
| https://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/index.php
| imiric wrote:
| Same, 18/20 for me. The all caps on MATTEL got me, and
| the STAPLES one as well, for some reason.
|
| But the differences on the lowercase "t" and "s",
| uppercase "g", the number 3, and both upper an lowercase
| "c", are obvious. Helvetica is much more refined.
|
| There are good reasons why well designed typography is
| expensive. A lot of thought and effort went into
| designing every line and curve. Even if most people can't
| consciously appreciate these details, they experience it
| subconsciously by how the design makes them feel. This is
| why brand designers are well paid. Anyone can design a
| logo, but to make a design that transmits a specific
| feeling, that requires a lot of skill. And typography is
| a core component of this.
| ghaff wrote:
| And there are also design fashions. I tend to dislike a
| lot of the current designs by seemingly 20 something's
| with perfect vision that use rake-thin fonts in some grey
| tone.
| immibis wrote:
| Market segmentation
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Then why are the fonts so expensive?
|
| Because they're considered important, and definitely take
| a long time to make. Try making one.
| mark-r wrote:
| Not to mention that it's almost impossible to make a
| living designing fonts.
| pc86 wrote:
| Maybe "this font is offensively priced to the point where
| I immediately think the person selling it is a criminal
| using this for money laundering, or clinically insane"
| and "it's hard to sell enough fonts to live off of" are
| related?
|
| Maybe if charlatans didn't say with a straight face that
| a font should be sold on a subscription model they'd sell
| more? Maybe if it didn't cost as much as a car they'd
| sell more?
| tptacek wrote:
| No, those things aren't comparable. Truffles have a
| functional role in a dish. A typeface does not have a
| meaningful functional role in a document, compared to the
| high-quality freely-available alternatives. This is like
| complaining about some kind of specially-carved or dyed
| truffle.
| gkoberger wrote:
| I respect you a ton (genuinely, I think you're the most
| interesting writer in the tech space), but you have a
| profound misunderstanding of the importance of typography
| if you think the only reason you'd need a paid typeface
| is the same reason you'd need a Hermes bag. I know you're
| a curious person, so hopefully you take this as an
| opportunity to open your horizons on the importance of
| it.
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm a typeface nerd. Bringhurst is one of 3 books on the
| end-table next to me right now. I spend a stupid amount
| of money for Hoefler fonts for my dumb blog.
|
| This to me is like the Menswear Guy on Twitter, who will
| explain in very great detail to you why the Hermes
| product is significantly better than the generic
| alternative. He's right, but he also understands that you
| buy the Hermes product to make a statement. Spend money
| on that statement if you want --- I do --- but don't try
| to pretend you have a right to it.
|
| _(i don 't mean i own any hermes products; just stupidly
| expensive typefaces)_
| gkoberger wrote:
| Then we aren't disagreeing. I never said anything about
| stealing or piracy; I agree with you that not being able
| to afford something doesn't give you the right to take
| it.
|
| I think we're responding to different things. You're
| upset the original person mentioned piracy, whereas I
| took their rant to be more about licensing changes being
| yet another way companies are creeping up prices from
| one-time-purchase to rent-forever. You used to be able to
| pay for a font and use it in a magazine, but now you have
| to pay per impression.
|
| And moreso, I'm annoyed by most of the comments saying
| that the free fonts on your computer should be enough.
| tptacek wrote:
| No, we disagree. I think those companies should creep up
| their prices. There aren't enough type designers employed
| in the world. The social cost to cumbersome font
| licensing is essentially zero; in fact, for the reason I
| gave just one sentence ago, it probably tilts the other
| direction.
|
| Further: the free fonts on your computer _are_ enough.
| You can do the full range of type design with what ships
| on Win10 or macOS, and you can do it strikingly. I cringe
| at my dumb blog typefaces today, because I could get an
| equally striking effect with the standard web font stack;
| most of the work is in setting the text, not in picking a
| particularly mannered typeface.
| gkoberger wrote:
| Okay, we disagree then! I hope you take the time to
| reflect on how weird and aggressive you've made this
| whole conversation, but it seems this is where we part
| ways.
| tptacek wrote:
| I may just be more comfortable disagreeing than you are!
| It's certainly not personal.
| bravura wrote:
| I usually like your takes, but where I disagree today is
| when you say: "Truffles have a functional role in a
| dish." but fonts don't.
|
| Either both do have functional roles or both are luxuries
| like Hermes.
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't want to get too deep into this because it doesn't
| matter to my point (you're also not entitled to eat
| truffled dishes any more than you're entitled to eat
| ortolans). But: set a document in one text face or
| another; it won't much matter at all to the experience of
| reading it (unless you pick a bad text face). Leave the
| truffle out of a risotto and you've made a different
| dish.
|
| The important subtext of this thread is that, when we're
| talking about functional typesetting, the solutions space
| is pretty constrained. There aren't _that_ many things
| you can do with a text face (vs. a display face). And you
| already have available to you extremely high-quality,
| well-hinted text faces at a full range of weights.
| davidivadavid wrote:
| Take any famous wordmark and replace it with a different
| typeface. You have a different wordmark. Typefaces aren't
| only used in body text. If you've read Bringhurst and are
| a typeface nerd, you should know you're arguing in bad
| faith. (Also generally like your comments, fyi, but you
| should know not to chime in that way about that topic on
| HN where the average attitude to anything design related
| is a mix of contempt and ignorance).
| tptacek wrote:
| There are plenty of wordmarks that use no pre-designed
| typeface at all (NASA, Disney, Coca Cola); you're clearly
| not entitled to the vectors of those marks so you can
| repurpose them in your own work. Not to mention that most
| of the greatest wordmarks of all time were designed
| without any access to per-impression-licensed commercial
| fonts!
|
| (I do not think it is the case that HN shuns design and I
| do not think you will be able to support with evience a
| claim that I'm ignorant of type design or commenting in
| bad faith).
| davidivadavid wrote:
| Correct. And those are the wordmarks I'm _not_ talking
| about. Let me try it differently: Would you say typeface
| choice plays no functional role in the branding of
| companies that _do_ rely on pre-designed typefaces?
| Vignelli 's work would look the same with different
| fonts? No, you know that's just absurd. Or are we just
| equivocating on "functional" here? If we're talking about
| letter forms, certainly looking a certain way _is part of
| their function_? And I _know_ you know more than the
| average guy about type design, which is precisely why I
| 'm confused as to why you would go for that seemingly
| meta-contrarian take.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| His argument is about body typefaces, not wordmarks at
| all, so yes this is talking past based on a different
| definition of "functional".
| tptacek wrote:
| It's not a contrarian take. The argument I'm making is
| simple. If you're doing functional type design, such as
| setting a book or a magazine article or a user interface,
| you have a wealth of viable faces available that do not
| involve per-impression licensing; many are free, some
| even came installed with your computer. If you're doing
| logo design, everything is out the window anyways: a
| wordmark is an aesthetic statement. If you're a designer,
| and you're designing a mark, and your best idea requires
| you to license a Monotype font with per-impression
| licensing, and you don't want to do that, just use your
| next best idea. That design challenge is really not much
| different than having your best idea depend on access to
| NYT Cheltenham, which you can't use at any price. Or, for
| that matter, the vectors of the FedEx logo.
|
| I'm not blowing you off. I'm taking your argument
| seriously. It just doesn't hold.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > If you're doing functional type design, such as setting
| a book or a magazine article or a user interface, you
| have a wealth of viable faces available that do not
| involve per-impression licensing; many are free, some
| even came installed with your computer.
|
| This is well put and thanks for engaging with the
| argument in good spirits.
|
| I imagine that fonts often matter a lot for brand
| identity and specific use cases (like programming) will
| also have specific aspects of importance (like ligatures
| in particular to a lot of folks and being able to tell
| symbols apart at a glance so IloO0 etc. don't present
| issues, but for many use cases some utilitarian "good
| enough" choice will suffice, because there are a lot of
| competently made free fonts out there.
| int_19h wrote:
| While we're on this subject, which extremely high-
| quality, well-hinted text faces that are freely available
| would you personally recommend to web and app designers?
| aeturnum wrote:
| Typefaces _do_ have functional roles, they {exude} a
| point in culture and time (the fonts that HN supports
| certainly time-stamps it).
|
| edit: HN won't allow Fraktur[1] characters, even though
| they are in the unicode standard. Yet more evidence that
| font matters for the tone of the message you deliver.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktur
| vunderba wrote:
| > A typeface does not have a meaningful functional role
| in a document
|
| 100% incorrect. There are fonts that are made
| specifically to increase legibility for a dyslexic
| audience. If that's not a functional role than I don't
| know what is.
| tptacek wrote:
| Oh for God's sake. You also can't set an instruction
| manual entirely in DIN Grindel Milk. The implied subtext
| was the functional equivalence of free and unfree display
| fonts. The most popular dyslexia font in the world is
| free.
| vunderba wrote:
| Ah that's my bad, I read the first statement without
| seeing that you prefaced it with "as compared to free
| alternatives".
| tptacek wrote:
| Sorry for coming at you that hard, it just felt like a
| gotcha. But we both misread each other!
| mrob wrote:
| One dyslexia font was tested and found to have the same
| legibility as normal fonts:
|
| "Dyslexie font neither benefits nor impedes the reading
| process of children with and without dyslexia."
|
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11881-017-0154
| -6
|
| I'm skeptical that any of these fonts actually make a
| difference. (Although if you like Comic Sans, you might
| as well continue using it; it doesn't do any harm.)
| close04 wrote:
| > Truffles have a functional role in a dish
|
| Cheap "truffle oil" can fill that role as much as a free
| font can fill the role of a premium one. The real truffle
| and the premium font have a functional role for the few
| people who can tell either apart. For the rest maybe
| anything works, just put something on the plate or
| screen.
| casey2 wrote:
| Not without adding fat
| butlike wrote:
| The truffle, and the font, add _essence_
| mlx0x wrote:
| Where's the car in this analogy?
| setopt wrote:
| How would you get away with the stolen truffles?
| bdelmas wrote:
| A high price in a font won't sink a business as a high
| price in truffle would for a Michelin chef... The price
| of a font for a business is extremely negligible... Or
| again you shouldn't buy it if your business is too small.
| And if it's that small you should be able to justify the
| value added by buying that font as truffle does for the
| chef.
|
| So we are back at what OP said.
| pc86 wrote:
| Well the analogy falls apart because (among many, many
| other reasons) the people eating at Michelin rated
| restaurants, especially 3-star, are completely
| insensitive to the price. It will cost whatever it costs
| and there will still be a long wait to get a table, if
| you even can.
|
| So rather than pretending we're talking about truffles,
| let's just talk about fonts directly without strained
| analogies. Fonts, which the majority of people don't even
| recognize. 90% of people don't even know what a foundry
| is. Your average person can't tell the difference between
| any two fonts if they're both sans-serif or serif.
| bdelmas wrote:
| It doesn't fall apart, you have examples that actually
| match it. Marketing boutiques of website creators match
| the 3-star Michelin analogy. High budgets from their
| customers (think LVMH) are the norm. And they will love
| and understand paying X for a font. In fact they will
| almost expect this type of thing in the design process.
|
| At the end of the day if people don't see the difference
| and the value between a free and a priced one, then they
| don't need to steal and can just use the free ones. There
| are plenty of amazing free fonts anyway some being the
| actual roots of many paying ones, and the gold standards.
| homebrewer wrote:
| Maybe it won't _sink_ the business, but prices were bad
| enough for IBM to cough up the money to grow their own
| truffles (of IBM Plex variety).
| derefr wrote:
| Try this analogy out: it's no wonder that people are
| interested in / have demand for generic reproductions of
| licensed cultivars of a plant (e.g. buying generic "grape
| tomatoes" rather than specific, expensive "cherry
| tomatoes.")
|
| It's also no wonder that people will happily buy these
| generics even when they're _not_ white-box reverse-
| engineered phenotype reproductions via independent
| breeding, but carefully bred-true genetic descendants of
| the proprietary original cultivar (a.k.a. "seed piracy"
| -- the thing Monsanto goes to extreme lengths to stop
| people from doing with their GMO wheat.)
| jonhohle wrote:
| I don't particularly like the analogy, but love cherry
| tomatoes. Grape tomatoes are such a blight on this world.
| Kind of like Arial is to Helvetica.
|
| I would never steal a cherry tomato, but will reject a
| grape tomato at any chance I get.
| notarealllama wrote:
| I can't figure out how to download your comment. (Written
| in a serif font textarea which will show up as a generic
| arial)
| wubrr wrote:
| > misunderstanding the importance of design
|
| Almost every font, style, pattern, component used in any
| new app today has already been designed, implemented,
| redesigned and reimplemented 20 times over. 'The importance
| of design' and all of the associated rhetorical BS only
| really serve to keep redundant (imo) designers employed.
|
| > 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.
|
| Can you actually make an objective argument for why certain
| fonts are more high-quality than existing free/open fonts,
| or how free/open fonts will make a product deeply suffer?
| I'd wager you can't.
|
| I've worked closely with many designers behind some very
| popular 'nice' award-winning apps. I've listened to endless
| rhetorical BS about how 'this specific element of the
| design is incredibly important and any deviation is a major
| hit to the product quality'. These same designers very very
| rarely even notice when an incorrect font/color,
| styling/layout is used, while arguing that any such
| deviation will ruin customer trust destroy the app.
| Complete BS.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Yes, and no, but why and when? What makes any particular
| typeface more or less _important_ had it been something
| different?
|
| When I was younger and a bit more haughty about design, I
| would have agreed, but now I feel like I need more to
| substantiate the claim, even thought I feel like I agree.
|
| > 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.
|
| This also needs a bit more. In what cases would some dish
| suffer "deeply" simply from having used commodity
| ingredients (a quality that's a core tenant in many famous
| designers' approaches)? You could more easily argue that
| something isn't the same as another, or perhaps less
| appealing visually, or perhaps less nutritionally dense,
| but it all seems a bit specious to me. Some cases would be
| significant, such as the choice of a garden tomato over a
| store tomato, but that's hardly a high-end concern, and why
| would high-end concerns be all that important anyway?
|
| My opinion is that design is as important as the problems
| it solves or the outcome it produces, and the existence and
| selection of appropriate typefaces can be a core component
| in that, it would not be easy to make a strong value
| oriented argument for the discrete choice of one expensive
| typeface over another commodity typeface unless one
| evidently solves a problem better, or its value is already
| established because of the association with an existing
| identity that already uses it.
|
| That's not to say they aren't worth paying for, or that
| licensing them isn't an issue, it's just kind of a
| debatable question how much one over another is worth or
| how important it is, much like art in general or other
| creative works.
| cgio wrote:
| I guess if they are so important we should be paying for
| them. Not that you argue against it per se, but in
| discussion context.
| fooker wrote:
| > Typefaces are incredibly important, and have been for
| centuries.
|
| Is there hard statistical evidence for this?
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| To buy fonts you have to care about design but not too
| much. If you do then you'll draw your text so it's a unique
| "font" instead of buying a premade font that other people
| can also buy.
| hnfong wrote:
| If you often use custom fonts that aren't preinstalled on
| typical systems, I can't help but wonder whether you also
| painstakingly choose fonts for non-latin character/non-
| latin based languages?
|
| I'll admit opening a can of worms on purpose, but if you're
| going for the "high-end", ignoring the i18n implications
| seems like a crime on its own, and yet most people don't
| really have the design expertise to evaluate whether a font
| looks good in another totally foreign language...
| nine_k wrote:
| Non-Latin? Well, OK, Greek and Cyrillic are close enough
| to Latin to be able to design the font for them following
| approximately the same style which apply to the Latin
| characters. You can make a Cyrillic Tahoma or a Greek
| Signika in line with the Latin variants. I'd say that
| this is the reasonable limit of non-latin support.
|
| If you take Hebrew, Korean, Georgian, Armenian, Thai,
| hiragana, katakana, you're in trouble. They all have
| different proportions, traditions, connections. You can
| stylize them a bit to be reminiscent of the way the Latin
| font is made, but you'll have hard time making a Hebrew
| font with large serifs like Bodoni, and will have hard
| time making it materially different from Times New Roman
| in a convincing way. It's better to make a separate
| typeface.
|
| Arabic / Persian / Urdu, or hanji are their own worlds
| altogether, hardly comparable to Western typography.
| johnisgood wrote:
| > Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when
| cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer.
|
| This heavily depends. As I mentioned before, cheaper
| materials did not always mean shittier, especially when it
| comes to cooking. Around here, healthy food is still
| cheaper (especially the ingredients) than junk food,
| although the recent increase in prices (of everything) is
| wild.
| nine_k wrote:
| There is a large number of free qualify fonts available at
| fonts.google.com, many of them are free for commercial use
| outside the web. There is also a handful of pretty good
| fonts not included in that collection but also freely
| available. (This is on top of good collections of fonts
| shipped with major OSes.)
|
| There is a number of free fonts which are also free for
| commercial use, but are clearly inadequate for serious
| typographic work, or only contain highly stylized glyphs.
| They may still be perfectly usable for a game, or a mobile
| app which is not typography-heavy. In many cases, the
| shortcomings are only visible at paper resolution, or only
| in print as opposed to screen.
|
| Then, there is a number of not very expensive fonts that
| cost $50-100 per face. If you really badly need a font
| exactly like that for a commercial project, and $200-300 is
| a prohibitively expensive for a permanent license you
| obtain, how much is the commercial project worth? Is it
| worth sweating over that very particular font?
| immibis wrote:
| If they're profoundly important for the design of your
| money-making app, the principle of "fuck you, pay me"
| applies. If you're making $50,000 every year and you
| couldn't do that without the design and you couldn't do the
| design without the font, pay up.
|
| If they're profoundly important for the design of your free
| software app... we all know how likely it is for a free
| software app to have good design. You'd be the first.
| 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| If Hermes did forbid me from carrying my (hypothetical)
| wallet more than 3 times a week, I simply would not buy
| that wallet. It would not become a moral crusade.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| But they'd deserve to be mocked in public. Complaining
| about something is usually not an attempt to make a moral
| crusade.
| tptacek wrote:
| Why? _Everybody_ can just not buy the wallet if they care
| about this term of use. Who 's being harmed?
|
| This isn't nitpicking. At some point you're really
| effectively just arguing that there should be a ceiling
| on what you can charge for a typeface. That's not an
| argument that respects the art and craft of type design;
| it's one that privileges convenience.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Why? Everybody can just not buy the wallet if they care
| about this term of use. Who's being harmed?
|
| Either because it's ridiculous and fun to laugh at, or to
| scare other companies off the idea, or both.
|
| It being a luxury product that people can avoid is not a
| reason to keep my mouth shut.
|
| > At some point you're really effectively just arguing
| that there should be a ceiling on what you can charge for
| a typeface. That's not an argument that respects the art
| and craft of type design; it's one that privileges
| convenience.
|
| Okay, to switch back to typefaces, I don't get the
| impression they're complaining about the high end, I get
| the impression they're complaining about the average.
|
| And if an entire class of product suddenly becomes luxury
| with onerous terms... that sucks! Do complain! It was
| working fine before!
| tptacek wrote:
| But that _clearly isn 't happening_. You have never had
| more access to high-end typefaces than you do today. What
| people are mad about is the licensing attached to ---
| literally --- the Hermes of type design. To get higher-
| level than the targets of these complaints you have to
| get into bespoke design.
|
| This came up earlier in the thread, and I kept someone
| else on the hook on this: I honestly think that it would
| be a good thing for the world if font licensing got more
| onerous, not less. Type design is a very difficult field
| to make a living in, and the world could use more of it.
| The social cost of making high-end type more expensive is
| negative, not positive.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > What people are mad about is the licensing attached to
| --- literally --- the Hermes of type design.
|
| Hmm, okay. If that's true then OP is just wrong.
|
| The problem is this argument wasn't clear from your
| initial comment. You claimed that there were plenty of
| excellent free options, while they claimed that the
| market had _generally_ gone to very onerous pricing. Both
| of those can be true at the same time.
|
| But if most of the market _hasn 't_ done that, and
| they're only looking at the top, then okay they're wrong.
| nine_k wrote:
| No, not a ceiling, but rather less baroque terms of use /
| price structure, I'd say. It's like licensing software
| per CPU core, and / or with a separate license with
| separate conditions for every of the two dozen components
| of software. These have been ridiculed because people who
| end up working with that get bothered and want to vent.
| Should not be a moral crusade though; a crusade to
| "liberate" someone else's property, as opposed to
| creating and maintaining something free, has a different
| name.
| 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 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| Hermes sells a $5000 wallet.
| kevingadd wrote:
| 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...
| badmintonbaseba wrote:
| There is a large range of permissive licensing between
| public domain and "fonts that cost money". Free as in
| freedom Linux distros ship a sizable set of fonts, and I'm
| sure most of them are licensed permissively.
| tasuki wrote:
| What? There's an endless supply of permissively licensed
| fonts, eg on Google Fonts. Many of them are actually pretty
| good. Yes, you'll find some bad ones too.
| abirch wrote:
| I've been meaning to roll my own font with
| https://github.com/glyphr-studio/Glyphr-Studio-2 but I've
| never gotten around to it. Then you can build on top of
| the public domain fonts or properly license fonts on
| Google Fonts.
| benatkin wrote:
| 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.
| rendaw wrote:
| 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| I agree except for the "piracy would be less of a problem"
| thing.
| dcow wrote:
| 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
| threatofrain wrote:
| 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| I _do_ believe that about shows and movies and have argued
| that point here in the past, but it 's especially true of
| typefaces.
| readbeard wrote:
| 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
| tptacek wrote:
| Serious question: who cares? There is no scarcity of high
| quality fonts (there are more of them available to ordinary
| people today than at any point in history). So they control
| Hoefler. If that's a problem for you, don't use Hoefler
| faces.
| ummonk wrote:
| Independent foundries want to sell typefaces with
| reasonable royalty shares. Customers want trusted
| marketplaces (i.e. ones where scammers aren't reselling
| fonts they've pirated) where they can purchase high
| quality fonts with reasonable licensing for reasonable
| prices. Both customers and foundries are poorly served by
| Monotype monopolizing the big font marketplaces.
|
| The Monotype monopoly is a legitimate problem that people
| have legitimate complaints about.
| tptacek wrote:
| You're saying, exclusively, that Monotype is app-storing
| the market for fonts by buying up the common tooling
| designers use to transact in fonts, right? You don't care
| what Monotype charges for its own fonts?
|
| (That seems like a perfectly reasonable complaint).
| wvh wrote:
| I don't know what a Hermes 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.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| It's not uncommon to require clients to develop a
| relationship with the retailer before they're allowed to
| buy the more exclusive goods. It's not the same as the
| licensing analogy but it's close.
|
| Imagine needing to spend 300% of an item's cost at the
| retailer before you're allowed the chance to buy the thing
| you actually want.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _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._
|
| That's why the usual approach, especially in this industry,
| is to _not give people choice in the first place_ - this is
| achieved by _renting_ , instead of selling.
|
| Clothes as a Service is already a thing. A CaaS with
| excessively specific restriction of use? Might not be -
| yet. No doubt someone will try it.
| z3t4 wrote:
| 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.
| butlike wrote:
| In my experience part of the pain is having some decision-
| maker or stake-holder getting married to a design during the
| mockup phase. A lot of the mockup generators will use fonts
| you'll have to license later for free in the mockup.
| 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.
| econ wrote:
| 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/
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| odo1242 wrote:
| 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?
| cut3 wrote:
| 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.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Legally they're software so yeah it's the same as licensing a
| proprietary piece of code.
| glitchc wrote:
| Why not just use free fonts? There are so many available that
| are perfectly good for most use-cases.
| thordenmark wrote:
| I really good font is a fine work of craftsmanship that is time
| consuming to make. The type designer deserves compensation for
| their work.
|
| There are also plenty of license free, and B-tier fonts
| available if you are on a tight budget.
| 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.
| tallytarik wrote:
| I suspect they are printing more money with the 1-10 megacorps
| who can afford to pay millions of dollars for per-eyeballs
| licenses.
| scripturial wrote:
| 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?)
| asimpletune wrote:
| 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.
| 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).
| JohnnyLarue wrote:
| But... fonts aren't copyrightable. Was this a patented font?
| Animats wrote:
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| That would be interesting to see. An a possible way of
| extending current typefaces through the Unicode glyph-
| space.
|
| Thought I'd had earlier: there's a lot of detail that goes
| into font design, particularly anticipating issues with
| specific media.
|
| E.g., faces meant for wet-ink print often incorporates
| features to avoid pooling or smearing ink ("ink traps",
| see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ink_trap>).
| Electrostatic printing (a/k/a laserprinters), and screen-
| based displays (CRT, LED, Plasma, eInk) also have
| idiosyncrasies which fine-detail font design may take into
| account.
|
| I'm not sure those would be hugely significant, but seem a
| domain in which a naive AI font designer might prove
| deficient.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| 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.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| 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.
| williamscales wrote:
| 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_...)
| porker wrote:
| 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)
| internetter wrote:
| Also the creator of Gill Sans--Eric Gill--sexually abused
| his children and dog. Licensing aside I wouldn't touch this
| font with a 12 foot pole
| dismalaf wrote:
| 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.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| There are many movies available for free
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| Some of them even use those free fonts
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ
| gorfian_robot wrote:
| I definitely would
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| 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.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| 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.
| r721 wrote:
| >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
| rossy wrote:
| 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.
| efitz wrote:
| 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.
| gjohnhazel wrote:
| 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.
| mchusma wrote:
| 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.
| lobsterthief wrote:
| How do you encourage people to continue making new typefaces if
| anyone could use them immediately? FWIW, it does take
| significant time to design individual typefaces. It's not just
| a set of characters: it's the character in lowercase and
| uppercase, how letters appear differently when adjacent to
| certain other letters, punctuation, etc.
|
| A significant amount of time goes into the process.
| rustcleaner wrote:
| If you've seen a bunch of memes on 4chan and 8chan with TEFF
| Renard, Trinite, and/or Lexicon fonts, that was me.
| alpemre wrote:
| An AI font generatooorrrr!! (whoop whoop horn sound effect:)
| amai wrote:
| https://www.calligrapher.ai/
| GenshoTikamura wrote:
| What about stealing code from github, images from deviantart and
| pinterest, knowledge base from stackoverflow, etc, to train AI?
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| The concept of "piracy" and copyright is completely ridiculous.
| Real piracy involves stealing, destroying and killing, not
| copying numbers.
|
| I never entered in a contract with you, producer of goods or
| innovation, you have no right to forbid me from copying anything.
|
| You may prevent your own customers from facilitating access of
| non paying customers to their goods (by making them sign a
| contract) and even persecute them in a civil court (for breach of
| contract).
|
| The fact that governments allow copyright owners to censor
| information on the internet to protect their commercial interest
| is just absolutely insane and incredibly damaging to the freedom
| of circulation of culture and ideas.
| ummonk wrote:
| It's clearly not the same font (you can see visible differences
| between the letters), and therefore not pirated. The appearance
| of a typeface can't be copyrighted in the US - only the digital
| instructions used to render them (e.g. if someone visually
| inspects a font and clones it that is perfectly alright, as long
| as they don't directly copy from and adapt the underlying font
| file).
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