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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.
FTA:
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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.)
Unlicensed software is always font of trouble in the business world, it seems.
The simplest solution is to use Courier or Courier New. Noone uses typewriters anymore, so it will confuse everyone and set you apart from everyone else.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
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.
Is it a police organization? A government agency charged with protecting the virtue of copyright? What company in their right mind lets some schmuck come in and do an audit without a warrant?
Unless this is a normal occurance in England...
They should get busted. I'm wishy-washy on the idea of copyright (and how far it should extend) but one thing I do believe is that businesses should pay for software with which they make money. It's one thing for the hobbyist who uses photoshop to make desktop backgrounds not to pay for it; it's another thing when it's a world-class photographer who supports themselves based on their photoshop output.
A question, though - why exactly is this in the YRO section? It has nothing to do with someone's guaranteed rights being violated or abridged. In fact, it is just the opposite; Adobe's rights (and those of the font distributors) are being protected. Someone broke the law, and got turned in by an ex-employee, probably somebody they crapped on. Fuck 'em, let them pay the full fines, and then some. Personally, I suggest collecting the fines from the employees of the company that made the decision to use unlicensed software and fonts. Why should they get off scott free? They're the ones who actually broke the law, the company charter didn't fly its ass up out of the file cabinet and insert the CD in the drive.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Microsoft Sans Licence.
A graphic designer I know (an ex-gf, actually) has not paid for either software or fonts for the last decade. She has rationalized that because once, in a staff position, she authorized the purchase of approximately 20 seats of adobe software for a graphics department, so Adobe owes her. She uses cracked copies.
I've often wondered what would happen to her and her clients if Adobe got wind of this. (Yes, it was a spectacularly bad break up.) =)
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
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 . . .
I was a little dismayed when I first read the blurb. I could swear there wasn't any type of legal protection for typefaces in US law... One of the reasons that Adobe et al. made a push towards programmatically described fonts (Type 1 and Type 3). Although they couldn't protect the typeface itself, they could protect the copyrighted code that generated the font.
Then I remembered where the register.co.uk was located. Thank god... I was almost forced to RTFA. Phew.
You can't win, Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
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.
It's one thing for the hobbyist who uses photoshop to make desktop backgrounds not to pay for it; it's another thing when it's a world-class photographer who supports themselves based on their photoshop output.
It sounds like you are trying to justify piracy. Good luck!
I'll probably be modded down for this...
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Are you really suggesting that only tangible things have value? Don't be stupid.
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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.
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.
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.
This is, by far, the simplest part of creating a font; so simple that an autotracer does a pretty good job. What's difficult is properly hinting a TrueType font (indeed, there are almost no properly hinted such beasts; hinting a Type1 font is much easier) and choosing the right spacing between characters. The only parts of a font that I would consider a program are the TT hinting and the OpenType contextual sostitution instructions.
As far as I know even a US court agreed that a font is nothing more than a collection of data (coordinates of Bezier curves); oddly, the same court stated that these data were copywritable (see Luc Devroye account on the SSi/Adobe case).
Clearly this leaves out the most difficult and creative part: designing the typeface. It's a form of art, and only the complete mess the US copyright statutes are could fail to protect them while protecting a collection of data!
There's a funny part to this mess: IANAL, but I understand that a font released under the GPL would "contaminate" any pdf embedding it, with really interesting results...
I suspect it's because the vast majority of us that write code at work aren't selling it to anyone. Does anyone really want an illicit copy of some data entry application I've written around here for our sales people? Probably not. How would they even get said copy? No, the only ones "buying" our software are our employers and it's not being written with the purpose that it will make money, only that it will fill a business need.
Yet your CEO is able to justify accepting jobs from customers he cannot, technically, support. This analogy is admittedly imprecise, but if a customer came in with a job on eight-inch floppies, would you accept it? Or would you turn the customer away, saying, "Sorry, we don't have the facilities to read your job data?"
Let's assume computers didn't exist, and you were still using cast lead type. If a customer came in requesting a job in Garamond, and you didn't have a case of Garamond, would you turn away the job, or suggest substituting a typeface you do have?
If we make the analogy more precise, and the customer walks in with their own case of Garamond type, would you return the type to them when the job was complete?
It's my personal view that computer software and data, once it's been created, is essentially valueless, since it can be infinitely duplicated at zero cost. So I don't see unsanctioned copying ("piracy") as a problem, but merely an inevitability that all software authors and vendors must acknowledge and learn to live with. However, even I am taken aback by the rather cavalier attitude your CEO seems to show for the economic realities facing those who created the tools he uses to conduct his business and satisfy his customers.
Our civilization stands at a crossroads in our social and economic evolution. The computer heralds a day where even physical goods can be duplicated infinitely and effortlessly (assuming we survive the rising seas), and copyrights and patents as we conceptualize them today truly will become meaningless. But we're in a transition period, and that future is in peril. Physical artifacts can't be freely duplicated -- a fundamental assumption of the old economy -- but digital artifacts can, which the old economy can't cope with. It will take an exercise of good character and strong ethics by many people to carry us through to the real New Economy.
Your CEO may care to participate in this transition, and acknowledge the good work he is able to do by rewarding the good work of others.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Its cool. Linus is welcome in my house anytime!
"If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated." - Voltaire
Read the software license you agreed to when you installed most any software.
Just wondering... does the license apply if the software is pirated?
I mean, isn't the customer signaling their intent to pay zero for the product and basically saying "I don't intend to follow your license. If I push this little button will you install for me anyway?"
Seems to me that the software industry is trying to show "intent to consent" to the license where no such thing exists.
I know that the ONLY reason that I push the button is that is what I have to do to install it.
Seems to me that a "contract" or "license" has to be agreed upon BEFORE accepting payment for the product to be legal... not afterwards.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
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 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.
I think you mean for propaganda purposes.
Great Intellect...
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.