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Font Maker Sues Universal Music Over 'Pirated' The Vamps Logo (torrentfreak.com)

Posted by msmash on from the without-consent dept.

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.

9 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. Schadenfreude much? by sconeu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "But our piracy is different! We're a big corporation, we're allowed to do this!!!"

    --
    General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
    1. Re:Schadenfreude much? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You know, since they have this one act of piracy.. we should just assume their whole business model is piracy based. We should seize their domain and prevent them from doing business in the future.. you know, just like the RIAA/MPAA wants to do to anyone else.

    2. Re: Schadenfreude much? by amxcoder · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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!

  2. Same rules to estimate damage? by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is he claiming each letter is one count of violation? Like RIAA typically does?

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    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  3. Will be hard to prove by caseih · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Will be hard to prove by sremick · · Score: 4, Informative

      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. .

      I know that RTFA isn't popular on /. but come on. It says right there that the designer did pay for a license for the font, but it wasn't one that permitted commercial usage.

  4. Re:details by BitterOak · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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  5. Re:details by MightyYar · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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    W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
  6. Re:So avoid commercial fonts then by xlsior · · Score: 3, Informative

    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...