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.

Comments

Re:Wha...?

[Daniel_Staal]

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.

Re:Fonts = Typefaces = not protected in the USA

[avalys]

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.