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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.
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.
In the US, you can copyright the program that draws a font: i.e. the Truetype font definition file.
However, you cannot copyright the font design itself: meaning, if someone wants to design their own font that looks exactly like yours, they're free to do so.
I'm guessing what this company did falls into the former category, which would still be illegal in the US.
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"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.