karl@umb.umb.edu (Karl Berry) (07/06/90)
1) There is no copyright protection for fonts in the United States. You can therefore scan any images you like from a type specimen catalog (say), and do whatever you want with them. Of course, if you scan images from a book, and distribute the images, and the book has the standard clause about ``...may not be introduced into a retrieval system...'' in its copyright, the publisher will probably not be happy with you (if they ever find out you did it). But if you just use the data, you aren't doing anything illegal. (This is what we're doing to make typefaces for GNU.) 2) You can get patent protection for fonts in the U.S., probably based on, as one poster suggested, sufficient advance over the state of the art. The one typeface I know of that is patented is Lucida, designed by Chuck Bigelow & Kris Holmes. (The advance over the state of the art, roughly speaking, is that the design is meant to rasterize well at medium-to-low resolutions, i.e., laser printers, not just at typesetter resolutions.) 3) West Germany passed a typeface protection law in 1981. It was not retroactive. Many designs are therefore copyrighted in West Germany, and copies of those designs could not legally be circulated there. But designs done prior to 1981 are not protected (although some companies have since copyrighted their versions of classic typefaces). 4) England passed a typeface protection in 1988 (I think, give or take a year). It protects only designs done by English artists. It *was* retroactive. What this means is not at all clear; no one to my knowledge has ever been prosecuted under this law. As one example, take Times Roman, designed in 1932 (pretty long ago, but not centuries) by Stanley Morison (an Englishman), among others (e.g., Victor Lardent, the punchcutter) for the London Times, first cut by Monotype. There have been hundreds (at least dozens) of copies of Times Roman. Are all those copies illegal now, i.e., could Monotype sue every other typeface company in the world that has a knockoff of Times? Seems unreasonable to me, but there's no evidence one way or another. As a more extreme example, take the Baskerville faces designed by John Baskerville (an Englishman), around 1768. Can Baskerville's heirs sue all the typeface companies? Seems very highly totally extremely unlikely, but there's no evidence. 5) I don't believe any other countries have any sort of typeface protection. 6) It is true that ``fonts are a tool''. But fonts are also a work of art. It takes as much time and creative effort to design a typeface as it does to write a novel, a large computer program, or what have you. It certainly seems unjust to me that type designers are not rewarded for their efforts. For a long time, type designers could make a living (although generally they did other things as well), because the means of font production was so expensive that only a few big companies could afford it. Now anyone with a PC can produce a font. I personally do not feel strongly that copyright protection for fonts is the best thing that society to do. What I do feel strongly about is that type designers should be rewarded for their efforts. This can happen without copyright protection: for example, people could commission a type designer. Even though the results would be free, i.e., potentially anyone could benefit, the people who wanted it most would pay for it. karl@cs.umb.edu
dhosek@sif.claremont.edu (Hosek, Donald A.) (07/06/90)
In article <1172@umb.umb.edu>, karl@umb.umb.edu (Karl Berry) writes... Grossly chopped down: >3) West Germany passed a typeface protection law in 1981. >4) England passed a typeface protection in 1988 (I think, give or take a >year). >5) I don't believe any other countries have any sort of typeface >protection. France has copyright protection for fonts and Switzerland has been considering it. >6) It is true that ``fonts are a tool''. But fonts are also a work of >art. It takes as much time and creative effort to design a typeface as >it does to write a novel, a large computer program, or what have you. >It certainly seems unjust to me that type designers are not rewarded for >their efforts. For a long time, type designers could make a living >(although generally they did other things as well), because the means of >font production was so expensive that only a few big companies could >afford it. Now anyone with a PC can produce a font. >I personally do not feel strongly that copyright protection for fonts is >the best thing that society to do. What I do feel strongly about is that >type designers should be rewarded for their efforts. This can happen >without copyright protection: for example, people could commission a >type designer. Even though the results would be free, i.e., potentially >anyone could benefit, the people who wanted it most would pay for it. Copyright protection is more than a means of guaranteeing that the font designer gets the money they deserve. It also can be used as a guard against the production of inferior fonts (cf TeX, which uses Copyright and Trademark protection to guarantee that all TeXs are functionally equivalent). Also, while your plan for how new typefaces might be created is unlikely to give any type designer money to live on (I speak from experience on this one). The types that are desired are seldom things like ("gee, I'd like a new typeface that works well for typesetting Latin [as in ancient Roman] texts"). Instead, the cases where people are willing to pay to commission a typeface, at least in the modern climate, are generally more along the lines of, "we need a Hangul font" or "we need an Arabic font" with little more than that specified. While this does leave a lot of freedom for the designer, it doesn't do anything to expand the bounds of traditional text faces. -dh --- Don Hosek TeX, LaTeX, and Metafont Consulting and dhosek@ymir.claremont.edu production work. Free Estimates. dhosek@ymir.bitnet uunet!jarthur!ymir Phone: 714-625-0147
DLV@CUNYVMS1.BITNET (07/06/90)
I know the following sounds a bit paranoid, but looking at what's happening with copyright protection of computer software---I mean specifically the 'look and feel' craziness, that stems, I believe from the lawsuit against McDonald's who allegedly infinged against someone's look and feel with their puppet characters. Presently, one big software company is suing another big software company claiming that it infringed on its look and feel by using 's' as abbreviation for 'save' and 'fr' for 'file retrieval'; another lawsuit concerns the use of a picture of a trash can on the screen. I can very well imagine something similar happening with typefaces, where 'look and feel' is a lot more applicable. Imagine font designer A suing B over misusing his 'g', B countersuing A because the 'g' was original designed by Bodoni and hence A's copyright is invalid, and the judge finding for A because Bodini is not a party to the suit, and anyway the statute of limitations for that claim has expired. This sort of silliness undoubtedly awaits us if typefaces are thus protected. Dimitri Vulis Department of Mathematics City University of New York Graduate Center Administrator of RUSTEX-L, the Russian text processing mailing list