karl@umb.umb.edu (Karl Berry) (02/03/90)
The only questionable thing I see in this font protection that Adobe just won is that there is an extremely limited number of ways to describes the generic shapes in PostScript. If one wants to produce a cubic spline, then one has to say <numbers> curveto, and to get the right shape, there is one particular set of <numbers>. It is certainly contrary to previous copyright law to say that if something can be produced in only one way, or in a small number of ways, that that thing can be copyrighted. So, what is protected must be of larger granularity. In order for Adobe to sue someone making a font, they would have to show that the organization of the program/font was the same, that the same hints were used in the same way, and the same basic shapes were being output in the same way. This seems reasonable. Speaking as someone who might be producing freely distributable PostScript fonts, I would certainly never (a) look at their font programs, and so (b) the odds of my producing the same program to produce the shape, even given that we are using the same language, is about nil. If it's NOT nil, then it's because there is only one way to do it, and so Adobe cannot sue me. In other words, it appears to me that the only thing that is protected is Adobe's actual code; i.e., people cannot legally take THEIR code and sell it or produce fonts with it or whatever. But if someone produces their own code, that is still perfectly fine. At least, I hope that is the case. If not, it is a nightmare. karl@cs.umb.edu