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Font Maker Sues Universal Music Over 'Pirated' The Vamps Logo (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Universal Music Group is being sued by HypeForType, which accuses the record label of using "pirated" copies of its fonts for the logo of The Vamps. The font is widely used for artwork, promotion material and merchandising of the popular British band, and the font creator is looking for a minimum of $1.25 million in damages. The font maker has filed a lawsuit accusing the major label of using its "Nanami Rounded" and "Ebisu Bold" fonts without permission. According to a complaint, filed in a New York federal court, Universal failed to obtain a proper license for its use, so they are essentially using pirated fonts.
Since font shapes cannot be copyrighted, they will have a tough time proving that their own ttf file (which can be copyrighted) was used unlawfully. If universal claimed the font was not the font maker's font, I suppose they could demand to see the ttf file, and probably a judge would go along with it. And who's to say that universal couldn't have asked a third party to make the logo who had access to the font ttf file.
While fonts themselves can be copyrighted, the typeface itself that is rendered by a font cannot be. So it is, in fact, entirely possible to create a lookalike font to a copyrighted font without infringing on the copyright on the latter as long as the lookalike font itself was not actually copied from the the copyrighted font.
In general (but not always), this means that the lookalike font was created from samples of text that use the original font, specifically text that only a utilizes a subset of the font, and a font designer would apply the patterns used in the characters within that sample to extrapolate the design of the remaining characters. Often, the end result can be virtually indistinguishable to almost anyone visually unless one knows exactly what to look for, and in exactly which glyphs. An excellent example of just how similar typefaces can be without infringing on copyright is to compare the typefaces Helvetica, Grotesque, and Arial.
In the case of something like a logo, the number of character samples can be often small enough that no differences will be detectable to the human eye at all.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I thought this was settled in U.S. copyright law. You can't copyright a font, only the computer instructions for making the font. Therefore, you can't restrict how text set in the font is distributed, only the usage of the font files by the designers.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Actually, if you go to the HypeForType website and read their licensing agreement it's pretty clear that for a commercial use in promotional materials it requires an "upgrade license".
Anyone in the business of producing commercial materials and using fonts is well aware of this type of licensing requirement. I can't believe a designer working for a major corporation would be blind to these simple facts of print, publishing, and promotion. In fact it's the music industry that really invented all these niche licensing requirements!
One minefield with 'free' fonts is that there are countless Fonts on 'free' websites that aren't really free, but merely have the copyright info stripped from the headers and been republished countless of times on 'free font' cd collections over the past 25 years, shrouding their true origins in many cases. The font website owner may think they are free, but that doesn't necessarily make it so...