Slashdot Mirror
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.
FTA:
, and:So, if:
I'm sure this is just a partial list but it illustrates nicely the pitfalls of software narcs. I won't deem whether this company is off the deep end on their violations -- it looks like they were less than careful, but these "violations" can appear in bizarre and unexpected ways. I'd not even thought of the possibility one could be harboring illegitimate payload by dint of receiving someone's documents.
I have however experienced it in other ways. I one time found an installation of Excel on one of our company computers with MY NAME, and MY LICENSE KEY! To this day I have no idea who or how that was "pirated".
The BSA (ironic acronym matching a possibly more wholesome organization, n'est-ce pas?) is a snarky pest, generating ill will from C to shining C++. I'd be interested to know their bottom line, for all of the dollars spent running the BSA how many dollars are returned in generated revenue.
Then, if it is even a positive number (I doubt it), I wonder if anyone would spend the dime and time to discover what the loss in sales from ill will spawns. Of course it's only speculation on my part, but I'm pretty sure I read an article in the last year where an organization switched proprietary purchasing gears after being ratted out, and skewered for some pretty honest mistakes.
Someday, they should consolidate... just call them: MRB (MIAA/RIAA/BSA). Every new article I read about any of these pushes me further from commercial offerings (not that that is any great deal anymore).
(After visiting Camden Publishing's website (I won't give URL, suspect they've got enough without slashdot) it appears to be a small to modest size company, and while they're a publishing company, I'd be surprised to see a company their size able to sustain large budgets for auditing (though it seems BSA has finally accommodated them). And even though the numbers are 95%, and 75% for "pirated" Adobe and Microsoft products, what are the real numbers? I'd be surprised if they were big, and I'd not be surprised if it's a case of a small staff cloning (technically illegally of course) software for convenience and under audited guidelines probably would not have purchased more copies.)
The publishing firm had claimed to be using just one font but in fact was found using 11,000.
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.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I used to work for a bank that did a fair job keeping track of licenses, or sort of. They purchased licenses for all employees for Microsoft products, eventhough a decent percentage of employees did not have it installed. They also purchased a copy of Photoshop and Corel Draw for every marketing person, eventhough only two people used the products. However, they loaded and never registered many pieces of software which would not have been a big deal to cover monetarily: Winzip, PDF printer, Winlpr, fonts, etc. It just boggles the mind that they go through so much trouble for boxed products, but just never did anything about other software. I told them that it would be better that Microsoft find out they were 20% out of compliance than for some shareware author to find out they had been using software for years on 100% of their machines without paying a dime.
Click here or here.
If this crackdown is accompanied by a corresponding drop in the cost of licences for some of these overpriced apps (Hello...Photoshop?) I'm all for this.
I application companies can defray the costs across more copies sold, prices should drop. Unless you believe Adobe is LOSING money on those educational copies of Photoshop (which don't come with support or upgrade options, of course) software should and could cost much less than it currently does.
There's a pretty basic rule: if you're using an application every day, and you're making money with it you should pay for it.
I'm especially disgusted by people who DEVELOP and SELL software who use...um...liberated copies of applications. I worked at a place that charged substantial licensing fees for their apps, but had not a single licenced copy of Word around. Stolen text editors, stolen backup software, stolen operating systems.
Unfortunately, all too typical.
Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
The article is a little unclear and more than a little inflammatory. My read of it is that the publisher actually wanted the BSA to come in and do the audit. The £80,000 they ended up paying wasn't a fee or a fine paid to the BSA; it was the cost of buying all the software licenses they needed to get fully into compliance.
So were they suckers? I'd say so, yes -- the BSA are greedy sharks and there was probably another option besides paying for every font and every piece of software on their network (e.g. get rid of some of it). But the company does seem to have been asking for it.
Breakfast served all day!
Gahdammit. I am one of hundreds of thousands of /. users and NO ONE listened to my prophetic vision back in April? Dammit. I called the cops. They wouldn't listen either. I am just too darned potent! ;-)
Uh... Oh... maybe the didn't listen to me.
--
I've worked with and on computers for nearly thirty years and I'm frequently surprised by the amount of piracy in workplaces. Oh, I'm not talking about out-right piracy like bittorrented copies of cracked Photoshop, but lots of little things.
For instance, I've worked in commercial printers that literally had thousands of typefaces. Let's say you have a job you need printed on a printing press. You collect all the images, layout files, typefaces, etc., and you send that to the printer. The printer is supposed to delete those fonts when the job is complete. They don't, of course, so you have millions of pirated typefaces out there.
Another example: images that are only supposed to be used once, logos "retouched" and used in other publications, templates you're supposed to pay for obtained from non-traditional (i.e. free) sources, trials that miraculously seem to go on forever, etc.
Stuff like this happens in all kinds of offices all over the planet. There are so many companies out there who, if they took a real and honest accounting of the software and tools and plug-ins they have, would find that if they did actually purchase everything they own, they'd likely not have half of it. And if they did, they would have spent themselves into bankruptcy. But they rationalize that it's all necessary, it's something they need to do in order to do business. Indeed, many companies couldn't perform some of their services without the stuff they obtained.
I dunno. I think that, one day, someone really large with lots and lots of locations and chances to pirate stuff is going to get slammed with a huge fine and it's going to open a very large can of worms. If Best Buy really did use Winternals products illegally, it would not surprise me in the slightest, and it would be very, very typical of most companies, large and small.
P.S. And, yes, I can't claim my hands are completely clean.
P.P.S. Don't copy that floppy.
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
Are you really suggesting that only tangible things have value? Don't be stupid.
This space intentionally left blank.
From one of the bazillion font download sites. Perhaps they downloaded 11001_free_fonts.zip.
Do we have open-source fonts, like we have open-source software, that anyone can change and improve on ?
From what I hear, a LOT of publishers never delete the fonts that clients bring in to print their stuff. Its pretty commonplace, I'm suprised this hasn't happened before.
11,000 fonts? come on. At a normal pub firm 11,000 is probably what they found just on the FONT SERVER. At a printing firm you'd find way more than that, because every job comes in with its own fonts and each font is unique.
Each. Font.
I have seen two jobs from two different clients use the SAME font from the same provider but with different creation dates and the fonts were just different enough that we couldn't use one font for both jobs.
Please, for the love of all that the BSA holds dear to its little black heart, don't start checking font licenses or we're ALL DOOOOOMED!
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
The Copyright Office specifically addresses fonts which are defined algorithmically:
So, a program with which you do typeface design may be copyrighted. Even if a font consists of programming language type instructions (such as TrueType fonts), it is not copyrightable, since that is just an "alternative means of fixing the data.""National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Read the software license you agreed to when you installed most any software. Almost all of them have a clause in there that says you agree, at your expense, to let the software maker or their appointed agent come in at any time and audit you for license compliance. Note that you get to foot the bill even if they find you're 100% in compliance. If you don't agree to the audit, you're automatically in violation of your license agreement.
And you won't be in compliance, that's a guarantee. 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. Only an original receipt or invoice made out to your company proves legal ownership, and your company probably threw those away long ago.
Does anyone else find it amusing that the fonts were audited by Monotype (the company frequently accused of making similar but slightly different versions of popular Linotype fonts)?
(i.e. Monotype's Arial to Linotype's Helvetica)
I can't see how anyone expecting to make a living in the IT industry can pirate with a clear conscious.
I appreciate what you are saying. After working for a software developer in support and then software testing, I have an appreciation for the work that goes into software development and support.
Now in the IT department of a different company, I try to discourage software copying where it has been a normal part of business. It's not easy though, to convince people who have been accustomed to installing whatever they want whenever they want, to pay for what, in their mind, used to be free.
While I have made some progress, people still think of me as being anal retentive for suggesting that we purchase and track licensing. Often, I can be viewed as 'in the way' by bringing up the topic. The conversations about number of users and the real cost of software are not topics that people have been accustomed to having.
So while your point is valid, it's not as simple as that.
Actually, if you EVER submit a document in Courier to a printer, it'll really fuck them up. Most RIPs (Raster Image Processors, which convert vector documents to halftone dots for printing) substitute missing fonts with Courier by default.
Seeing this, printers will automatically assume that there's a missing font and send your job back to prepress as they normally would... and prepress will probably scratch their heads for a while trying to figure it out.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Windows licenses on computers running Linux.
Software purchased, but never installed.
Software lost or stolen and identical replacements bought.
Software purchased and installed on computers that are no longer in use because either the computer was replaced with a newer one, or the company has gone out of business.
Volume purchases that over-buy the actual amount needed or used.
Other causes.
I never hear figures given on excess and redundant software purchases.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Most of the designers I know have personal font libraries of containing a staggering amount of fonts. Their collections are accumulated by "borrowing" the fonts from every agency and customer they have ever worked with. They'll also share entire libraries with other designers yielding collections over a gig. How they are able to utilize a collection of that size is beyond me, but many can ID a font by eye and know exactly where to find it in their library.
I can't blame the designers though. Every agency I've worked for has extensively pirated creative apps. The last one only owned one license for Adobe CS and "shared" it among their entire design department. They're dragging their feet upgrading to CS2 because the activation will make this sharing impossible - and cost them a fortune for several dozen legit licenses. I've also worked in shops where you had do physically disconnect the network cable to work in certain apps so that it couldn't check serial numbers across the network. In an environment of blatant piracy like this, no designer is going to think twice about not paying for a font.
Maybe a few high-profile cases like this will make agencies think twice about underbuying licenses. Until they pay their fair share, the price of Photoshop will never go down.
If some BSA guy shows up, just inform him that he is not welcome. If he tries to force or sneak his way onto your PC, call the police and have him arrested. If he bothers you every day hoping you'll crack, you can get a restraining order.
I've been considering starting my own home desktop publishing business. I keep doing things for people for free and it's gotten to a point where I've gotten pretty good and could actually make a bit of money for what I do.
Would this font issue affect someone like me? What if I create a small brand for myself, even in a tiny market? What if it gets bigger? Will I have to pay someone just for using a certain font?
I never thought of such thing.
Blockquoth the AC:
And speaking as someone who currently works on code that ultimately goes into those ludicrously expensive 3D applications the GP poster mentioned, I'd like to thank that poster personally for ripping me off. After all, like all software developers, I am ludicrously wealthy as a result of the software I make. My employer being ripped off doesn't in any way impact the profit-sharing scheme that pays my rent and that of my equally ludicrously overpaid colleagues.
I imagine those who spend months designing high quality professional fonts feel much the same way. Font design is one of those crafts where very few people are genuinely good at it, but using good work has a subtle but very real effect. I don't think it's at all unreasonable to expect those benefitting from the hard work of skilled craftsmen to pay fair compensation in return, and I fail to see why it matters whether they're doing it for personal financial benefit or for some other reason.
I find it tragic that the GP's position is so acceptable around here that it actually gets modded insightful.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.