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Font Raid Spells Trouble for Publisher
rs232 writes to tell us The Register is reporting on a publishing firm that got fined for using unlicensed fonts. The firm claimed to only be actively using one font, but was found to be using approximately 11,000. In addition to their font headaches, the firm was also found to be unlicensed on 95% of their Adobe software and 75% of their Microsoft software — talk about a bad week.
The US government is one organization that does not recognize that fonts are intellectual property. Font names can be trademarked, but the actual letter shapes cannot be even copyrighted. Reference: wikipedia.
Though the situation from the article happened in the UK, I think that US law differs in that fonts or typefaces have no legal protection. Because of this, in the US one would be able to copy fonts to their heart's content . . . Ironic that the home of the MPAA and RIAA and DMCA has no protection for typefaces . . .
It's not that hard, actually. Remember that high-end fonts (which is what I'm assuming we are talking about here) have seperate faces for bold, italic, bold-italic, smallcaps, 'light', 'display', 'caption', and any and all combinations of the above. One font-family can easily include thirty or so fonts, all of which are sold seperately. (Or, of course, you can buy the bundle. But if you don't acutally need the caption-oblique version and a few others it might not be worth the whole bundle.)
So, a couple hundred font-families is several thousand actual fonts. For a publishing house, where you need the right font for every occasion, that's a small collection.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
A "font" and a "type face" aren't the same thing. While modern computers can do "good enough"mdash;for casual use, at least—extrapolations of different sizes and styles from a single font, professional publishers are going to use a distinct font (with appearance tweaks) for each different combination of face, style, and type size. Times-12pt-Roman isn't the same font as Times-12pt-Italic, Times-10pt-Roman, etc. It doesn't take a whole lot of different faces, sizes, and styles to get up around 11,000 fonts.
>How is it even possible to use 11,000 different type faces?? They have to be adding up all the fonts on all the PCs. 500 PCs with unlicensed Adobe Garamond = 500 fonts.
Bzzt, wrong. As TFA says, the audit was conducted by a representative of Monotype, which alone lists 2230 distinct fonts in its catalog. I'd think they would properly know how to account for usage. And there are a lot of foundries.
That's true about letter shapes. But it is a nontrivial effort to go from a set of letter shapes to a digital (non-bitmap) font, which is a computer program and rather clearly subject to copyright. Since what is at issue here is the computer program and not the letter shapes...
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The BSA is akin to a racket organization: Instead of "You pay us up or we get fat Tony to break your legs" it's "You pay us to do an audit and pay whatever licence fees we decide you should pay or we sue you". Same tactics, but in better suits.
Also, as others mentioned, 11,000 fonts is absurd. They probably counted each and every copy on every computer whether it was used or not. A normal audit would have deleted unused software and fonts, possibly replaced a few with FOSS where more appropriate. The BSA will make you sign a contract where you essentially give up many rights, your first-born, the works.
I always recommend to my customers to buy their fonts and software legally (I deal with a lot of DTP/graphics shops), but the company where I work would never denounce a customer for non-criminal activity, and we're not shy about bashing Microsoft and recommending FOSS alternatives.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
Replying to myself once I felt that clarification was needed:
Specifically, the opinion you linked states that "a font scaling program is copyrightable." Each digital font in a modern vector format includes a "hinting" subroutine for each glyph that deforms the outline font 1. for optimal display at a given pixel size and 2. (especially for fonts in Arabic or South Asian scripts) to match those of the characters surrounding them. Therefore, each font file contains its own font scaling program and is therefore copyrightable.
That's what Sterling Ball of Ball Strings found out (http://news.com.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html). I took him three year to get his company Microsoft free. From his example our company now only runs open source software. Well except for one computer used test documents going to someone else's windows computer. It is being used less and less.
Its not a "silly semantic point", its an ideological crusade dressed up in semantic clothing. While technically, perhaps, correct (insofar as, pedantically, copyrightable material isn't necessarily intellectual property, copyrighted material, however, is, and all copyrightable material not expressly placed in the public domain is also copyrighted material), its inaccurate in its message.
No, "intellectual property" is not an "ideology" of any kind. "Intellectual property" is a class of actual, existing legal rights (a component of the somewhat broader category of "intangible personal property".)
Physical goods (and even moreso real property) can be easily shared among people as well; the existence of propietary rights, whether in tangible personal property, intangible personal property, or real property has nothing to do with whether or not they can be "shared" or "reproduced" in the "natural order of things", but with the social judgement that protection of a proprietary interest in those things enriches the community by encouraging the development of wealth that would otherwise not be developed.
Further, except for patents specifically, the subject matter of IP rights aren't "ideas".
Both tangible personal property and real property being held for more than a limited time and with the free control we associated with modern ownership is also fairly new; grants for a period, or for life, of land from the government (some overlord) were common, and even personal property returning to a governing authority on death who had some practical discretion on whether or not to allow it to be inherited for a fee were not uncommon.
And when land wasn't granted for a period of time, it was often granted in fee tail where it was designated by the grantor to fall to the grantee's natural heirs and to revert to the grantor if the natural line failed.
Since "property" is merely an exclusive power over some thing, someone who takes your "intellectual property" deprives you of it no less than someone who takes your "physical property".
Using the term "intellectual property" conditions people, if it does so at all, to think of the rights people possess over the subject matters of "intellectual property" (generally, not "ideas") as similar to the rights owners possess over other kinds of property, which they are.
You seem to fail to realize that all property rights are social inventions to protect, and thereby encourage, the development of wealth on the presumption that its accumulation and development will redound to the common good.
It's interesting you should mention it that way. When I installed the Windows Vista Beta, there was a segment in the EULA expressly saying that you can't copy the fonts, except for copies made solely for the purpose of printing output (ie, you can send them to a printer, or in the more complicated case to another computer that is acting as a print server, as long as they go away when the print job is done).
In a more similar vein to your 'PageFoo' example, Autodesk at one point had a viewer application for its various drawing formats so that you didn't need a $5000 seat just to print.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Yes, totally offtopic, perhaps even trollish, feel free to mod as such. Still pisses me off though.
Absolutely. And the ones that don't allow this notify you when you try to embed them in any program I've used recently. It takes a concious effort to send someone a font that has usage guidelines that don't allow you to do so.
- ------- There are ten kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who... Huh?
in the context of TFA... the company in question is British... American law doesn't apply... yet...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I really wish I had bookmarked the comment but someone dug up a quote with the term piracy used to describe copyright infringement. The quote was from a couple hundred years ago or so. If the term was used that way back then then it's certainly just as relevant today. The point is the word was not recently "hijacked", it had been in use long before the current copyright battle.
When I installed the Windows Vista Beta, there was a segment in the EULA expressly saying that you can't copy the fonts
Easy to figure out why...
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
I'm 99.99% positive he's referring to this BSA.
(Insert snarky "what did you expect on an American website" comment here.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
You can't trademark, patent, or copyright a traditional typeface -- at least, not in the United States. For those who don't know, a typeface or font used to be a collection of metal blocks with raised edges which, when used in a printing press, would impress the images of the corresponding characters onto a page.
There is absolutely zero protection for the distinctive look of a typeface, which is why you can go out and buy "look-alike" fonts and why you can even download clone fonts.
The intellectual property protection for computer fonts comes from the idea that fonts are computer programs -- because a computer font is a file consisting of a set of instructions that tell the computer how to render the characters that make up the font. So copyright applies.
However, there's nothing stopping you from printing out each of the characters at some large point size (say, so there's one character filling each page), painstakingly tracing those characters with graph paper, and creating your own knock-off font. In fact, this technique is used a lot. What you won't be able to do, unless you're a master craftsman or engineer, is determine and duplicate the hints that make a font legible at small point sizes.
Now, I can't speak for the IP laws in the UK, but it is at least true that in the U.S., only computer fonts enjoy legal protection, and only because they are considered software.
You can't do anything with the fonts in the document, other than use them for viewing that document - the fonts embedded in a PDF don't magically activate themselves for the rest of the system, or even for other PDFs, it's purely for the document in question that you're viewing/printing/etc.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Remember why these fonts were published in the first place. It wasn't a generosity of spirit, it was so their for-profit products would be useful enough to get marketshare.
Printed material is fully rendered and doesn't depend on anything held by the user other than a good light source.
Images are fully rendered and only require an appropriate viewer.
But HTML pages (among other things) require that the specified fonts actually be available on the viewer's system. MS could put out the best HTML designer in the world, but if it used fonts that weren't on the user's systems then the results would still look like crap. Making the fonts readily available makes their products more useful and hence more attractive than a competitor's.
I was one of the early adapters of the MS TT fonts and it made a HUGE difference in the appearance of many sites. The people who use 'FrontPage' et al aren't techically sophisticated enough to understand why it's a Really Bad Idea to use the really cool fonts. So they put a lot of effort into creating cool pages that were then rendered using my default font, rarely with good results.
P.S., the same analysis applies to postscript and PDF. In that case the format designers decided to provide a mechanism for embedding any necessary fonts.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
To legally copy a typeface in the USA, you have to print a sample and digitize it yourself. You can't just copy the postscript or truetype font files. Those files do have copyright protection. The name of the typeface is probably trademarked, so you have to choose a new name for your copy of the typeface.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Correct, except for size. Professional publishers use PostScript typefaces, as they scale to any size. Loading different sized screen fonts (to see things rendered somewher correctly on screen for proofing) hasn't been an issue since the early '90s and Adobe Type Manager.
Well, not really. Most high-end faces do have multiple "sizes", because just scaling a face won't work correctly for all possible sizes. A type family will have specific fonts optimized for small type or large type, or book settings. A Display face will have much more delicate fine details, since it will be printed large and they will show up. If you just shrank down that design to 6pts, all the fine details would literally disappear and the words might well be impossible to read. So a small face (often called a caption face, since they are frequently used for photo captions) will be much heavier overall than the Display face, so much so that if you blew up a caption face to 60pts, it would be some of the ugliest type you'd ever seen! But it's extremely legible at small sizes, and has the "feel" of the type family, though the weights are completely different.
Adobe initially tried to solve this problem with Multiple Master faces in the 90s -- the weight of particular strokes were marked to expand or contract as the size changed, but it was quite frankly a huge pain in the ass to manage and the results were never as good as what a professional type designer would get optimizing a face for a particular size.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Clauses like this in contracts of adhesion (meaning a contract where you did not get a chance to negotiate terms with the other party) are typically invalid and regularly struck down in courts. Basically, if a clause would not have been accepted by a hypothetical 'reasonable person' who had a chance to negotiate, in the opinion of the court, then it is void. Letting a third party come into your company and poke through all your computer systems with sensitive data on them is not something that the courts often regard as reasonable. Here's a key phrase from the US case law, lifted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_of_adhesion
Remember that, by the BSA's rules, merely having all the original media, license certificates and product keys for every single copy you've got installed is not sufficient.
Ah, the BSA. This is a little scam they run. Here's how it works: They come along to you with a bunch of impressive-looking lawyers and make all these demands. You're probably a fairly small company. You don't have legal staff in-house. You don't realise that the law is actually on your side at this point; you think that they're telling the truth, and you have to let them audit you. So you let them.
At this point you have just granted them permission to do this stuff, so you can't later claim (when your lawyer explains things to you) that their investigation was unlawful. The whole scheme is based around conning you into granting them permission without realising it.
What you should have done was:
(1) instruct them to get off your property
(2) give them the name of your lawyers, and instruct them to refer all further correspondance there
(3) if they are still here, call the police and tell them you need some trespassers removing
Then you can have a nice leisurely discussion with your lawyers and figure out what, if anything, you actually need to do. Most likely they will tell you that you don't need to do anything unless the BSA has actual evidence of infringement.
Under no circumstances should you ever allow anybody to search your premesis unless they are holding a warrant and they are an officer of the law. The BSA themselves will never, ever have the right to do this because they are not the police.
As for those 'rules' they have about having to show the invoices? They made those up. They have no legal standing. The BSA has to prove that you are breaking the law, not the other way around. Then you merely have to show anything that proves them wrong. "Innocent until proven guilty" applies.
But don't take my word for it. If you are in a managerial role in a company and you are not absolutely sure about this stuff, go and talk to your lawyers and ask them for precise written instructions about what you should do if this stuff happens. Then distribute those instructions to all your management staff.
The BSA is like a mail worm infestation: it's far better to block them at the firewall than to try and clean up the mess once you let them get onto your network.
Whether a font can be included for a print file, or embedded in a PDF is solely at the discretion of the font publisher. That said, most tier-one font foundries do allow for both. Adobe and Linotype for example both allow this. Most publishing software like Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress will gather the fonts upon request so the customer can take the file to the printer to be printed.
.ps file in a text editor, change the embedding parameter, and then Distill the .ps file to PDF. It's easy if you know what to look for ;)
Someone also commented that this is why printers ask for fonts to be converted to vectors. Actually, this in order to avoid font display problems, and cross-platform font issues.
Interestingly, Adobe also allows one copy of the software purchased for the office to be installed at the home.
PS: in the event that some sadistic font foundry has not allowed their font to be embedded in a PDF. You can simply print the file to postscript, open the
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
The thing is, it's not the typeface that the computer font represents that is copyrighted; it's the font file itself, which is a program. It is an implementation of an idea; like other software and like written works the idea itself can't be copyright but the expression or implementation (as software) of it is.
Some would call them butt-ugly (MS Comic? Arial?!?!), but the MS core web fonts are still available: http://fontconfig.org/webfonts/ -- MS licensed them in a way that makes it hard to put the Genie back in the bottle.
What they're referring to as a "font scaling program" is the command interpreter which executes the instructions in the font - i.e. a TrueType interpreter, or in the case of Postscript typefaces, the Postscript interpreter itself. That is, any code which may be used to draw scaled typefaces, but is not itself part of a typeface. Any instructions which are specific to a typeface are not copyrightable in the US.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I guess the answer to that is I don't know...
Although you usually physically cannot embed fonts in at least any of the Adobe formats if they're not allowed to be, they'd have to be sent separately and installed by the user (someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but I don't think I am). Can you embed fonts in Word files? I didn't think you could...
I suppose it's kind of the same thing as if someone gave you a CD-R of AutoCad and said, "here's the software you'll need to open up those drawings I sent you". (and of course assuming that there wasn't a dongle or click-through licence agreement needed) Who's responsible in that case if it were audited?
The thing is that anyone who's worked with fonts professionally for more than a week or so(as a publishing house no doubt is) knows full well that fonts sometimes cost a lot of money (can a couple hundred bucks for a single style) and that the ones that look good usually have restrictive usage rights and that you must be careful as to how you manage them.
It's entirely possible that management in this place didn't know about the font problem. It beggars the imagination to think that the people who used them didn't know. What it comes down to is that I find it very very hard to believe that this was done without knowledge on someone's part that it was breaking copyright.
- ------- There are ten kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who... Huh?
if you want a TeX font for the humanities you have to cough up money for the Lucida commercial font.
Actually Palatino and Times are distributed with LaTeX and offer quite appropriate for the humanities. And both come with math fonts (mathpazo and txfonts respectively).
Thanks for showing your working, but it really DOESN'T need to mean every font size. As someone up there has already mentioned, it's entirely possible to have multiple cuts of a typeface family (each a different font) that you and I will read as "one" but a font audit will claim "fifty". For example...
6 65
http://www.fonts.com/findfonts/detail.htm?pid=413
Other reasons why 11000 fonts can be found...
Freelancers taking around their own font stashes. It used to be a SyQuest disk, now you can carry an iPod with gigabytes of the things.
Jobs that pass through with fonts included
Someone made a copy of an unlocked Adobe/Monotype/Linotype etc. font library
On my own font audit, I found more than 2000 on one Macintosh. We have 250 Macs here... Needless to say we are now completely legal.
That's never stopped people.
I used to design shareware fonts as a way of generating beer money in college. Some were decent. A lot were flat-out crappy. To this day, nearly 15 years later, I STILL see the downright crappy fonts used in high-profile places - TV ads, action figure packaging, porn sites...
"Cheap/free" seems to be a very powerful motivator for a lot of designers.
(One of them is ludicrously popular. And yet I can count the number of people that paid the shareware fees for it on one hand.)
----
"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
Not sure what these look like yet, but people should be aware of the Stix Fonts project. They are professionaly produced and cover a large number of glyphs (several thousand). I submitted a blurb to slashdot when they were having public comments on the license, but it got rejected. Anyway, they are intended to be free (of charge) for a lot of use. Not sure if they can be included in a Linux distro.
The words are not patented. Nor are their styled likenesses, though the likenesses are Trade Marked wrt the FIFA World Cup. There's a difference. I suggest you read up on the difference between copyrights, trade marks and patents.
As for colours, pantones have been protected since their creation in the '60s. Nothing new there.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.