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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.
In the publishing business, managing your fonts is an important part of doing business. Technically, I'm not even sure that customers are allowed to include fonts, but they do it all the time. Typefaces are not copyrightable, but computer generated fonts count as programs, and so they are copyrightable. Generally speaking, if I bought a page layout program, "PageFoo," and my printing house did not own a copy, I could not include a copy of PageFoo with my files to enable that printing house to print them out. Is it technically legal to do the same with font files unless the license permits this? I don't think so. Does everyone do it anyway? Yes. Do publishers keep customer font around in case the customer forgets to send it in? All the time.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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.
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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.
And the fact that several Microsoft and Adobe applications will "helpfully" insert font files into documents and even emails so that you can have a proper "presentation" with the end user (who might not have the same fonts installed) doesn't do much for anyone trying to keep things legal. If I open a PDF with embedded fonts, am I now a pirate?
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."
You're joking, right? Most of the free fonts offered online are not suitable for publishing. Commercial fonts are carefully, painstakingly tweaking for maximum visual effect, and most font hobbyists just can't put that much time into theirs.
Furthermore, these free fonts usually have limited coverage of Unicode. What can you do with them if you have to typeset a text with many usual glyphs, such as IPA characters, Eastern European Latin characters, or even non-Latin scripts such as Cyrillic, Arabic, or CJK?
There are only a very few free-in-as-freedom fonts that are actually of sufficient quality that publishers can use them. The Computer Modern fonts used with the TeX typesetting engine is one example, but that's only appropriate for the sciences, and if you want a TeX font for the humanities you have to cough up money for the Lucida commercial font.