Ownership Of Font Styles?

jesse.k asks: "I'm curious about the copyright ownership of typefaces, specifically homemade copies of commercial faces. I've seen a great deal of fonts made to look like popular movie logos (Bladerunner, Fight Club, Star Wars, The Matrix), and I was wondering what is the legality of this? If one creates a similar looking font from scratch, does this fall under fair use? If one decides to distribute the font, what type of legal issues would it face, even if it is distributed in non-profit manner? I ask this, because even respectable free font archives on the Internet always seem to have at least a couple derivative fonts."

Comments

Foant uses

[kalon]

Considering the difficulty of "manufacturing" successful fonts, it's not surprising.....

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Fonts are treated specially

[cco]

There is a long history of font design copying, and unless something has changed recently, all of the case law says that it's legal. Because fonts (particularly type-metal fonts) are directly useful, they cannot be protected by copyright (which protects expression, not useful items). Because they are 'obvious', they cannot be patented. What does that leave? The name. Why are fonts called 'swiss' or 'Geneva' when they are obviously Hevletica? Because the copyright on the name is held by a type foundry. That is the only part of a font that is covered by patent, copyright or trademark law. I would expect that it is possible to treat the code behind a Postscript or TrueType font as a trade secret, but the principles of utility and obviousness will still get in the way of other types of IP protection.
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Re:Fonts are treated specially

[Municipa]

Incidently, that's why it helps sometimes to search for related words of the font you're looking for. For instance, someone made a font looking very much like that used in Star Trek, but they called it 'FinalFrontier'.

Re:Fonts are treated specially

[webmaven]

Although the typeface design itself is not covered, there is one other aspect of typefaces that is covered by copyright, the outline information in the file.

It is illegal to make a derivative digital copy of a font file without permission from the copyright holder.

This covers such dubious practises as importing a font in fontographer, scaling all the glyphs by %101, and saving it as a new file.

For more information, check out TypeRight.Org.

Coverage of a ruling in this regard is at Internet Type Foundry Index.
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Re:Copyright == Copyright != Fair Use

[RalfM]

No, because the first (quoted) paragraph talks about a re-implementation of the font, while in the second paragraph you are talking about a copy through electronic means. A better analogy would be distributing Linux-made-to-work-and-look-like-MacOS...

Ralf

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

Scanning in fonts?

[Municipa]

I wonder how hard it is to prove you've scanned in a font of paper materials and distributed it under a different name. You could even do something such as modify the vector paths of each letter just slightly to prevent some kind of pattern matching to determine if they are identical, perhaps.

Ethics and Issues Relating to Type

[Booker]

From the Font HOWTO:

Font licensing is a very contentious issue. While it is true that there is a wealth of freely available fonts, the chances are that the fonts are ``ripoffs'' in some sense, unless they come with a license indicating otherwise. The issue is made more confusing by intellectual property laws regarding typefaces. Basically, in the USA, font files are protected by copyright, but font renderings are not. In other words, it's illegal to redistribute fonts, but it's perfectly legal to ``reverse-engineer'' them by printing them out on graph paper and designing the curves to match the printout. Reverse engineered fonts are typically cheap and freely available, but of poor quality. These fonts, as well as pirated fonts are often distributed on very cheap CDs containing huge amounts of fonts. So it's not always easy to tell if a font is reverse engineered, or simply pirated. This situation creates an enormous headache for anyone hoping to package free fonts for Linux.

Perhaps one of the most offensive things about the nature of font piracy is that it artificially debases the value of the work that type designers do. Pirated fonts invariably are bundled en masse onto these one zillion font CDs, with no due credit given to the original designers. In contrast, what is commendable about several legitimate font foundries is that they credit their designers.

See also the comp.fonts FAQ and typeright.

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Fonts are art works

[extremely]

Fonts are art works. Every letter gets tweaked and mooshed and adjusted. Letter pairs are sometimes handled specially (ligatures) like the fi combination in many fonts lets the dot in the "i" smear into the "f". Most of the "copycat" fonts shoot for the same looks but are quite different when directly compared.

Too good of a knockoff CAN get you sued. Adobe suit or this one Adobe again and more on that second one.

The copyright issue isn't fixed but it _is_ getting there. Shameful that we protect other things way too far and this so little.
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Re:Fonts are art works

[drix]

Actually, fonts are not art works, which can be copyrighted (e.g. logos). But why reinvent the wheel? This has all been said before, so I'll paraphrase:

Typefaces are viewed by US law as a utilitarian device, much like a pencil or hammer, and do not meet current copyright guidelines.

There you have it. I suppose back when metallic typefaces were in widespread usage they could have seemed a lot more analgous to a hammer or pencil, but it's pretty obvious that that argument is irrelevant now.

Adobe did not technically win the suits that you mention on the basis that their fonts are copyrightable - they won it because the defendant infringed on their "font software". IANAL, but I think that this was just some sort of fancy legal doublespeak or maneuvering since software obviously is copyrightable. I do remember reading that the distinction was an important one, because the judge, by using the "font software" term, set no precident for fonts themselves being copyrightable.

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Copyright == Copyright != Fair Use

[lw54]

If one decides to distribute the font, what type of legal issues would it face, even if it is distributed in non-profit manner?

If one decides to distribute Microsoft Windows 2000, what type of legal issues would one face, even if it is distributed in non-profit manner?

See the similarities?