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.

Comments

Re: Schadenfreude much?

[amxcoder]

Was going to say similar...

The font maker needs to use the same rules [as the media cartels] when figuring out infringement costs. The media companies love to use a "per infringement" claim. So each instance of each letter of the font that was used should be treated as a separate infringement, plus throw in some wild guest-imates of how many people purchased items containing the font, and how many eyeballs may have seen it in promotions and media since it's first illegal use...

If someone shares a music album online, the RIAA/MPAA don't go for just 1 instance of piracy for the whole album, they treat EACH song as it's own instance. Therefore, using this same reasoning, a font is a collection of multiple pictographs (like an album is comprised of songs), so logically it seems safe to assume that each letter in a font is treated like a song on an album would be treated. Just because the creator packaged a group of pictographs together into a single 'font' (similar to how songs are packaged into a single album) does not change anything. It also appears that more than one font typeface was pirated, so this adds even more penalties to the mix, as it is like songs from 2 albums were pirated.

Heck, going off the logic of another recent story, I'm sure this gives the NSA reason to start spying for years to come on the entire Universal media corporation like they have been with KDC over piracy!

Re:details

[MightyYar]

but I expect that the license options are similar.

Fonts are not, in of themselves, copyrightable. Only computer fonts can by protected with copyright, and that's only because technically they sort-of behave like code.

So it's not really like images, but computer code. While it is very common for computer code to have separate commercial and private licenses, I would think that this would not be common for fonts. Fonts can be freely cloned, so you would expect the market to toss out the nasty licenses. I mean, if I want a completely free license to a font I can't imagine it would cost more than a few hundred dollars on a freelance site to get a decent clone. That's why I was surprised.