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FreeType posts patent warning
Anonymous Coward writes "According to the the FreeType web page, there have been some new concerns raised about Apple's patents on TrueType. I hope this doesn't affect the planned TrueType support in XF86 4. " It appears that they are still checking into the issue, but I'd really like TrueType support. A lot. Let's hope Apple responds nicely.
IANAL, but I think that if a patent holder doesn't protect it's intellectual property, it loses the right to defend. If Freetype has been around for a long time, it could be argued that this is the case.
I'm not a lawyer either, but I can tell you that patents are a little bit different than trademarks, where the owner risks losing protection altogether by failing to enforce their mark. With a patent, so long as you obtain one within a year of first publishing, displaying, or selling your invention, you own the right to make others stop using or selling that invention for 20 years. If you choose not to enforce your patent for the first 10, and then go after people when your invention falls into widespread use, that's your prerogative.
In Apple's case, it looks like they missed the one year deadline. They published the TrueType specification and software using it circa 1990, but didn't file for their patents until 2 years later.
Of course, if you scan in a font, trace the outline and save it as a new font, you're creating a different program, and hence no copyright infringement has occurred (except in the case where the traced outline happens to be identical to the original, right down to the last hint -- but the chances of that happening are so small as to be negligible).
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
That would be Elisha Gray, who ended up founding Western Electric.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Here's how I did it:
- Grab a copy of the FreeType font server here (for linux/x86 w/glibc2), h ere (for solaris/SPARC) or here (patch to XFree sources -- not for the faint of heart).
- Put the xfsft executable somewhere in your $PATH.
- Get a directory full of TT fonts. I have a directory on my Linux partition full of symlinks to
/dosc/windows/fonts/*.ttf, for example. /usr/X11R6/lib/fonts/tt is not a bad place. - Run the ttinst script in that directory; this will create a fonts.scale file.
- ln -s fonts.scale fonts.dir
- echo "catalogue=/usr/X11R6/lib/fonts/tt" >
/usr/X11R6/lib/fonts/tt/xfsft.conf - Add the following to your
.xinitrc:
And you're set!xfsft -port 7100 -config /usr/X11R6/lib/fonts/tt/xfsft.conf
sleep 1 # Give xfsft a chance to start up
xset +fp tcp/127.0.0.1:7100
xset fp rehash
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Just to follow-up on my above post, Apple did NOT miss the deadline.
The date of filing was May 9, 1989. They published the specification (according to your information) in 1990, about three years later.
I.
Metafont predates these patent applications by at least 3 years and looks (to me) like it effectively covers all the claims.
What will they rethink of next?
Another advantage to using a font server is that it keeps the X server from coming to a griding halt when it needs to render a font with many glyphs. Ever click on one of those eastern fonts with a zillion different characters in it?
Even small fonts take a while to render on a 386 or 486 X terminal, so the concurrency provided by a separate font server is highly desirable there.
As the Xfstt maintainer I thought I should post a
note. I was informed of this patent a few weeks
ago but hadn't had a chance to really look at
it beyond a quick glance.
Suposedly it only covers "hinting". Someone
had said to me that prior art almost definitly exists (going back to the egyptions and the
ancient greeks no less).
It was also pointed out that Apple has never
pressed this issue with anyone. I have been to
busy lately to figure out how/if to respond to
this problem.
As it is now I plan to release xfstt 1.0 within
a few days (no major changes since the last one..
just a few minor fixes and updates that make
things a bit more polished).
If Apple isn't enforcing the patent...then might
as well let sleeping dogs lie. At worst it can
be moved to servers and maintainership outside
of the non-free world.
-- Steve
I agree about SGI's fonts - I think SGI's fonts are roughly comparable in quality to Apple's fonts, with Microsoft's fonts trailing them. Of course, Linux font technology trails even Microsoft's :-(.
SGI's fonts are a major reason I still use a 1994 Indigo2 running Irix instead of Linux as my workstation. I find it much more comfortable to read stuff.
D
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Heh.. Yesterday I said something about how the IBM/G3 Linux systems might not cetch on, and several people replyed "Yea, but Apple will help get GCC up to speed, GCC is better than thier compiler." Well... I doubt it.
Apple's support of GNU has always been more hype IMHO than fact. They like to say they do to gain market share, but when it comes down to it, they seem to need to be forced to do anything. If people are going to hope it will happen, they will probably be SOL.
Think about it. IBM lets out motherboard specs for Motorola processors, hoping Linux will be used on them. What would Apple gain by getting GCC to work better with the G3? They wouldn't have people buying thier hardware, because it would be avaliable cheaper else where. They wouldn't have people buying thier OS, because if they developed GCC for the hardware, Linux would be stronger on the hardware. What's left? Well, maybe the "polish" like fonts, GUI stuff... Oh, hey, maybe Apple will let out thier font technology too, so no one has a reason to buy anything from them!
Heh.. I don't see it happening.
Just to make it clear, binary font files still are copyrighted, only the 'design' can not. You can't legally cat YourFont.ttf > MyNewFont.ttf (of course you would need to change some metadata too.)
You can 'copy' someone elses fonts as long as your font drawings are original. For example, you can scan in text and then draw your own outlines around the pictures of the glyphs.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Not necessarily, many companies keep their processes secret, IE Coca-Cola. Transmeta hold at least two patents, yet we still don't OFFICIALLY know what they are doing.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
So if it's the implementation, why can't a clean-room implementation escape patent restrictions? Real up, it's the idea (or at least the algorithm, which is much the same).
Because a patent protects not just the implementation, but the idea itself. If all you want to do is protect programmers from having their implementations copied, just give them copyright protections and they can keep their source closed. What software patents do is to set up a minefield for coders. Every time he comes up with a clever way of doing something, he must look it up at the patent office, and make sure that no one has thought of it before. If someone has, then he can be effectively blackmailed into either paying outrageous fees or rewriting major sections of his software. And if he doesn't catch the patent in time, then he will release his product, and can then be ruined by a lawsuit.
The basic problem is that "inventions" in the computer field are different from those in other fields. Algorithms get rediscovered and reimplemented dozens of times by different programmers working independently. We get paid to "invent" better ways of getting a given task done. And while an inventor in another field might become rich off a single invention, programmers discover dozens of new algorithms in the course of a given project. Therefore it simply is not reasonable to give out patents to such "discoveries."
This is compounded by the lack of technical knowledge in the patent office. Most patent officials don't have a clue about our industry. Thus a clever lawyer can get a patent for a technique that any competent CS grad could tell you was common knowledge for years. That no one wrote about the technique is often simpy a result of the fact that it seemed too trivial to bother documenting. Yet if you know little about how programming works, it might seem to you that it is a new discovery. Thus unscrupulous folks can obtain patents for things that a talented high school student could dream up in an afternoon.
That's why many programmers oppose software patents. Copyrights are sufficient to pretect against piracy. Patents simply make life miserable for coders, with no real benefits.
Just to clarify what I said - binary font files are distributed under a software licence (GPL, MS EULA, X, etc.), just like any other software. The actual art design of the font can't be copyrighted however.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
While having a TrueType font rendering system sounds great and all, there don't appear to be any free TrueType fonts which are all that much better than their T1 counterparts.
Good TrueType fonts are typically manually hinted. Also, each style of the font such as italic, bold, and bold italic are individual fonts instead of having the font renderer try to fake it.
This results in a much cleaner, crisper font than what you get from using one of the many font creation programs out there.
Unfortunately, the skill involved in creating manually hinted fonts doesn't come cheap and while individual fonts can't be patented, they can be copywrited.
Microsoft has been somewhat generous and made a few commonly used typefaces available for limited distribution at no cost. I believe these include Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana and Courier, which is really all you need 99% of the time.
The exception being menus and what not, these typically use a font specially created for small labels. I believe MS uses MS Sans Serif for this.
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The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.