Is this the wrong time to rant about font licensing though? I’ve always bought and paid for fonts, but as I’ve gradually transitioned to mobile app development, I one day realized that all the fonts I bought for print are now worthless to me.
These crazy outdated licenses that let you print as many magazines or books you want forever, for a one-time price. But if your hobby is making apps, then suddenly the same font will cost you 50 times more - for a single year.
I guess these font sellers imagine there’s still some app boom - a Klondike rush with developers bathing in dollars. Maybe if their licenses were more realistic, piracy would be less of a problem.
There is maybe nothing in the entire world that I am less sympathetic towards than the cause of font piracy / font liberation. You have perfectly good --- in fact, historically excellent --- fonts loaded by default for free on any computer you buy today. Arguing for the oppression of font licenses is, to me, like arguing about how much it costs to buy something at Hermès. Just don't shop at Hermès.
Part of the problem is that Monotype has a bit of a monopoly in the upper segment of the market though right? I know they're not the only players, but it feels like they've vacuumed up enough small, successful foundries that they now control enough of the market that they can get away with the kind of aggressive behavior that wouldn't be tenable in a healthier, more competitive marketplace.
From Wikipedia [0]
> Via acquisitions including Linotype GmbH, International Typeface Corporation, Bitstream, FontShop, URW, Hoefler & Co., Fontsmith, Fontworks [ja] and Colophon Foundry, the company has gained the rights to major font families including Helvetica, ITC Franklin Gothic, Optima, ITC Avant Garde, Palatino, FF DIN and Gotham. It also owns MyFonts, used by many independent font design studios.[3] The company is owned by HGGC, a private equity firm.
For those less familiar with them, those are BIG names, and the acquisition of them could perhaps aptly be compared, for instance, to Disney's acquisitions of properties like Lucasfilm and Marvel.
Serious question: who cares? There is no scarcity of high quality fonts (there are more of them available to ordinary people today than at any point in history). So they control Hoefler. If that's a problem for you, don't use Hoefler faces.
Independent foundries want to sell typefaces with reasonable royalty shares. Customers want trusted marketplaces (i.e. ones where scammers aren't reselling fonts they've pirated) where they can purchase high quality fonts with reasonable licensing for reasonable prices. Both customers and foundries are poorly served by Monotype monopolizing the big font marketplaces.
The Monotype monopoly is a legitimate problem that people have legitimate complaints about.
You're saying, exclusively, that Monotype is app-storing the market for fonts by buying up the common tooling designers use to transact in fonts, right? You don't care what Monotype charges for its own fonts?
(That seems like a perfectly reasonable complaint).
I agree the average person is likely fine with the fonts on their computer, but this is profoundly misunderstanding the importance of design. Typefaces are incredibly important, and have been for centuries.
I'd argue that complaining about font prices is less like a Hermes bag, and more like complaining about high-end ingredients when a supermarket has cheap stuff. Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer.
Even under this analogy you're complaining about the price of luxury goods and saying that it's no wonder people shoplift to steal the truffles because they're so darn expensive.
If you can't afford the license for the font, your app is small-time enough that you can make do with one of the many, many high-quality fonts that are available for free, there's no need to pirate it. If your app is big enough that the difference matters, then you can likely afford the sticker price.
No, I'm saying a Michelin chef can complain about a 50x increase in the cost of truffles without negating the fact that a lot of people happily survive on ramen.
I think there's some confusion in who is responding to whom, then. I never said anything about piracy, but the person responding to me may have confused me with the top-level comment.
All I have done is defend the importance of typography, and never mentioned piracy or stealing.
Typography is important. So important that we have really good looking fonts available for free. And a custom font isn’t going to be the deciding factor in whether your next AI powered social graph app sinks or floats. Guaranteed.
Because designers fuss a lot about nearly undetectable differences in color, fonts, and many other things. Maybe they make a difference in the aggregate. But if you can’t identify the difference between Ariak and Helvetica (to pick a particularly glaring example) you’re probably not one of those designers.
I agree. Many people can hardly tell the difference between Arial and Helvetica. There used to be a website where you could test how good you are at telling them apart.
You won't notice many small differences between certain fonts. But that doesn't mean they're unnecessary. As you said, they make a difference when taken together. For screens, there are a number of adjustments and techniques that improve screen readability. Hinting, separate designs, contrast for low dpi and subpixel rendering compatibility, for example. At least some of the optimizations don't work out of the box, but have to be adjusted by designers.
That's why it can happen that a font you bought for print media now requires an extra license for websites and apps.
There are plenty of wonderfully readable fonts for the web and apps that are free and sufficient for most projects. If you want something special, I don't think it's wrong to pay for it. Personally, I would prefer more reasonable prices, though.
And there are also design fashions. I tend to dislike a lot of the current designs by seemingly 20 something’s with perfect vision that use rake-thin fonts in some grey tone.
Same, 18/20 for me. The all caps on MATTEL got me, and the STAPLES one as well, for some reason.
But the differences on the lowercase "t" and "s", uppercase "g", the number 3, and both upper an lowercase "c", are obvious. Helvetica is much more refined.
There are good reasons why well designed typography is expensive. A lot of thought and effort went into designing every line and curve. Even if most people can't consciously appreciate these details, they experience it subconsciously by how the design makes them feel. This is why brand designers are well paid. Anyone can design a logo, but to make a design that transmits a specific feeling, that requires a lot of skill. And typography is a core component of this.
Maybe "this font is offensively priced to the point where I immediately think the person selling it is a criminal using this for money laundering, or clinically insane" and "it's hard to sell enough fonts to live off of" are related?
Maybe if charlatans didn't say with a straight face that a font should be sold on a subscription model they'd sell more? Maybe if it didn't cost as much as a car they'd sell more?
No, those things aren't comparable. Truffles have a functional role in a dish. A typeface does not have a meaningful functional role in a document, compared to the high-quality freely-available alternatives. This is like complaining about some kind of specially-carved or dyed truffle.
I respect you a ton (genuinely, I think you're the most interesting writer in the tech space), but you have a profound misunderstanding of the importance of typography if you think the only reason you'd need a paid typeface is the same reason you'd need a Hermes bag. I know you're a curious person, so hopefully you take this as an opportunity to open your horizons on the importance of it.
I'm a typeface nerd. Bringhurst is one of 3 books on the end-table next to me right now. I spend a stupid amount of money for Hoefler fonts for my dumb blog.
This to me is like the Menswear Guy on Twitter, who will explain in very great detail to you why the Hermès product is significantly better than the generic alternative. He's right, but he also understands that you buy the Hermès product to make a statement. Spend money on that statement if you want --- I do --- but don't try to pretend you have a right to it.
(i don't mean i own any hermes products; just stupidly expensive typefaces)
I don't want to get too deep into this because it doesn't matter to my point (you're also not entitled to eat truffled dishes any more than you're entitled to eat ortolans). But: set a document in one text face or another; it won't much matter at all to the experience of reading it (unless you pick a bad text face). Leave the truffle out of a risotto and you've made a different dish.
The important subtext of this thread is that, when we're talking about functional typesetting, the solutions space is pretty constrained. There aren't that many things you can do with a text face (vs. a display face). And you already have available to you extremely high-quality, well-hinted text faces at a full range of weights.
While we're on this subject, which extremely high-quality, well-hinted text faces that are freely available would you personally recommend to web and app designers?
Take any famous wordmark and replace it with a different typeface. You have a different wordmark. Typefaces aren't only used in body text. If you've read Bringhurst and are a typeface nerd, you should know you're arguing in bad faith. (Also generally like your comments, fyi, but you should know not to chime in that way about that topic on HN where the average attitude to anything design related is a mix of contempt and ignorance).
There are plenty of wordmarks that use no pre-designed typeface at all (NASA, Disney, Coca Cola); you're clearly not entitled to the vectors of those marks so you can repurpose them in your own work. Not to mention that most of the greatest wordmarks of all time were designed without any access to per-impression-licensed commercial fonts!
(I do not think it is the case that HN shuns design and I do not think you will be able to support with evience a claim that I'm ignorant of type design or commenting in bad faith).
Correct. And those are the wordmarks I'm not talking about. Let me try it differently: Would you say typeface choice plays no functional role in the branding of companies that do rely on pre-designed typefaces? Vignelli's work would look the same with different fonts? No, you know that's just absurd. Or are we just equivocating on "functional" here? If we're talking about letter forms, certainly looking a certain way is part of their function? And I know you know more than the average guy about type design, which is precisely why I'm confused as to why you would go for that seemingly meta-contrarian take.
It's not a contrarian take. The argument I'm making is simple. If you're doing functional type design, such as setting a book or a magazine article or a user interface, you have a wealth of viable faces available that do not involve per-impression licensing; many are free, some even came installed with your computer. If you're doing logo design, everything is out the window anyways: a wordmark is an aesthetic statement. If you're a designer, and you're designing a mark, and your best idea requires you to license a Monotype font with per-impression licensing, and you don't want to do that, just use your next best idea. That design challenge is really not much different than having your best idea depend on access to NYT Cheltenham, which you can't use at any price. Or, for that matter, the vectors of the FedEx logo.
I'm not blowing you off. I'm taking your argument seriously. It just doesn't hold.
> If you're doing functional type design, such as setting a book or a magazine article or a user interface, you have a wealth of viable faces available that do not involve per-impression licensing; many are free, some even came installed with your computer.
This is well put and thanks for engaging with the argument in good spirits.
I imagine that fonts often matter a lot for brand identity and specific use cases (like programming) will also have specific aspects of importance (like ligatures in particular to a lot of folks and being able to tell symbols apart at a glance so IloO0 etc. don’t present issues, but for many use cases some utilitarian “good enough” choice will suffice, because there are a lot of competently made free fonts out there.
Then we aren't disagreeing. I never said anything about stealing or piracy; I agree with you that not being able to afford something doesn't give you the right to take it.
I think we're responding to different things. You're upset the original person mentioned piracy, whereas I took their rant to be more about licensing changes being yet another way companies are creeping up prices from one-time-purchase to rent-forever. You used to be able to pay for a font and use it in a magazine, but now you have to pay per impression.
And moreso, I'm annoyed by most of the comments saying that the free fonts on your computer should be enough.
No, we disagree. I think those companies should creep up their prices. There aren't enough type designers employed in the world. The social cost to cumbersome font licensing is essentially zero; in fact, for the reason I gave just one sentence ago, it probably tilts the other direction.
Further: the free fonts on your computer are enough. You can do the full range of type design with what ships on Win10 or macOS, and you can do it strikingly. I cringe at my dumb blog typefaces today, because I could get an equally striking effect with the standard web font stack; most of the work is in setting the text, not in picking a particularly mannered typeface.
Okay, we disagree then! I hope you take the time to reflect on how weird and aggressive you've made this whole conversation, but it seems this is where we part ways.
Typefaces do have functional roles, they {exude} a point in culture and time (the fonts that HN supports certainly time-stamps it).
edit: HN won't allow Fraktur[1] characters, even though they are in the unicode standard. Yet more evidence that font matters for the tone of the message you deliver.
> A typeface does not have a meaningful functional role in a document
100% incorrect. There are fonts that are made specifically to increase legibility for a dyslexic audience. If that's not a functional role than I don't know what is.
I'm skeptical that any of these fonts actually make a difference. (Although if you like Comic Sans, you might as well continue using it; it doesn't do any harm.)
Oh for God's sake. You also can't set an instruction manual entirely in DIN Grindel Milk. The implied subtext was the functional equivalence of free and unfree display fonts. The most popular dyslexia font in the world is free.
Cheap "truffle oil" can fill that role as much as a free font can fill the role of a premium one. The real truffle and the premium font have a functional role for the few people who can tell either apart. For the rest maybe anything works, just put something on the plate or screen.
A high price in a font won't sink a business as a high price in truffle would for a Michelin chef... The price of a font for a business is extremely negligible... Or again you shouldn't buy it if your business is too small. And if it's that small you should be able to justify the value added by buying that font as truffle does for the chef.
Well the analogy falls apart because (among many, many other reasons) the people eating at Michelin rated restaurants, especially 3-star, are completely insensitive to the price. It will cost whatever it costs and there will still be a long wait to get a table, if you even can.
So rather than pretending we're talking about truffles, let's just talk about fonts directly without strained analogies. Fonts, which the majority of people don't even recognize. 90% of people don't even know what a foundry is. Your average person can't tell the difference between any two fonts if they're both sans-serif or serif.
It doesn't fall apart, you have examples that actually match it. Marketing boutiques of website creators match the 3-star Michelin analogy. High budgets from their customers (think LVMH) are the norm. And they will love and understand paying X for a font. In fact they will almost expect this type of thing in the design process.
At the end of the day if people don't see the difference and the value between a free and a priced one, then they don't need to steal and can just use the free ones. There are plenty of amazing free fonts anyway some being the actual roots of many paying ones, and the gold standards.
Try this analogy out: it's no wonder that people are interested in / have demand for generic reproductions of licensed cultivars of a plant (e.g. buying generic "grape tomatoes" rather than specific, expensive "cherry tomatoes.")
It's also no wonder that people will happily buy these generics even when they're not white-box reverse-engineered phenotype reproductions via independent breeding, but carefully bred-true genetic descendants of the proprietary original cultivar (a.k.a. "seed piracy" — the thing Monsanto goes to extreme lengths to stop people from doing with their GMO wheat.)
That's not true at all. You think games would feel as immersive if everything was Calibri? Magazine-style articles would feel as tactile if they all used the same system fonts? Etc.
You may not care about fonts, but to say they don't matter is a misunderstanding. For example, I could glibly say we only need one programming language (the user doesn't care what syntax you used before it was compiled down to 1s and 0s!), but any engineer would make the case why that's not true at all.
No, I think we're just looking at it from different perspectives.
Yes, most people are fine choosing from the fonts available on their computer when writing a document.
But that's not what me nor OP are talking about. We're talking about shipping software (like a mobile app), or publishing a blog post. In that case, the best you can specify is either a very common font (Helvetica, etc), or a high-level classification (serif, sans-serif, etc).
There are many free fonts out there, yes, but there's a reason they're free. The quality for a majority of them is significantly lower, and many designs come with constraints (either utilitarian or stylistic). You don't have to agree, but I'm not being absurd or lacking sincerity.
You're also just going around and commenting the same thing on each of my posts. But don't limit your understand to just my writing here; there's thousands of books about the importance of typography if you're curious to learn more.
> There are many free fonts out there, yes, but there's a reason they're free.
Go on and tell me what that reason is then. Are you also going to tell me free open-source software, like Linux is low-quality because its free?
> The quality for a majority of them is significantly lower
Again, a completely baseless, unprovable assertion.
> You don't have to agree, but I'm not being absurd or lacking sincerity.
What do you call your example of using Calibri for everything in response to someone suggesting the use of free fonts?
You are lacking sincerity and making absurd claims. Almost everything else you say is literally baseless rhetoric that you are unable to back up with data or any objective argument.
> there's thousands of books about the importance of typography if you're curious to learn more.
It's amazing that you apparently know of thousands of such books, but are unable to make one coherent, objective argument to back up your claims.... did you read them?
You’ve been combative throughout this thread, and it's clear that you don’t see typography or design as disciplines that warrant serious thought. I don't think you're actually willing to engage with an explanation of why it matters but I'll try anyway.
System fonts are the absolute bottom of the barrel. Some are well designed but using any of them is a visual shorthand that you didn't care enough to put thought into your design. You're associating your product with the ocean of amateur work on the internet, giving the impression you copy pasted a template.
There are some high quality free fonts typically backed by massive organizations with actual typographic expertise. Most free fonts however, are amateur work that are technically and functionally lacking. Professional fonts are well designed at all weights, they're carefully spaced, they include much larger character sets to support more languages, contain features like lining and non-lining figures, variable font weights, small caps... are those all slight differences?
There’s a reason so many articles exist with titles like “Google Fonts That Don’t Suck”. Most of them do. If you are a professional whose job requires working with type, then choosing a font is foundational to your product. Arguing that all design is BS is just lazy; it's not a coherent argument.
I highly recommend practicaltypography.com, a free web book that discusses all of this and more, including why system fonts are bad and why a professional typeface is worth paying for.
This claim that system fonts are the "bottom of the barrel" is just so clearly false that I don't understand how you can be an advocate of typography and say it. Both Microsoft and Apple put huge amounts of effort into typography, contract or employ well-regarded designers, and their outputs are themselves well-regarded.
If you wanted to say "most of what's on Google Fonts is bottom of the barrel", you'd have a colorable argument. But that isn't what you said.
San Francisco is a great font. Arial is a perfectly functional semi-clone of Helvetica, Times New Roman is a decent interpretation of Plantin. Roboto is an interesting mash-up of Helvetica, DIN, and a few others.
System font from a web standpoint means you get one of these depending on the user's choice of phone, desktop, and/or browser.
It is somewhat like buying art because the frame covers a blemish on the wall. That the print inside the frame might be of a famous impressionist painting does not mean that the frame or the print necessarily go with the room.
The car analogy involves a car rental place - that they may give you any one of several newish, functional and even stylish vehicles does not change that you may often wind up being paired with a vehicle mismatched for your function.
Around the time Matthew Carter was creating Georgia, one of the most widely-used system fonts in the world, for Microsoft, he was also widely considered one of the best typographers in the world. Georgia is not hotel room wall art.
There are many laughably horrible attempts at fonts out there on free font sites (I remember my days learning to write software in the early 00s), sure. But there are also high quality professionally designed and typeset fonts available for free, including those of the system variety. The argument is comparing the latter to expensive designer fonts, not the former to high quality fonts.
Disagreeing with you doesn't mean I'm combative. (Not that I care)
> typography or design as disciplines that warrant serious thought.
We are talking about fonts here, more specifically fonts used in software, more specifically the quality of free fonts used in software. Not 'design' as a whole which is much more than that.
> System fonts are the absolute bottom of the barrel.
If you say so.
> You're associating your product with the ocean of amateur work on the internet, giving the impression you copy pasted a template.
Reusing a font means you're copy-pasting your article/app/etc from a template? Erm ok.
> There are some high quality free fonts typically backed by massive organizations with actual typographic expertise.
'Some'? Like 1000? 10000? How many fonts does one application need? 'typically'? How 'typically'? And I'm not being pedantic - your statements are pretty meaningless without actual numbers.
> Professional fonts are well designed at all weights, they're carefully spaced, they include much larger character sets to support more languages, contain features like lining and non-lining figures, variable font weights, small caps... are those all slight differences?
What is a 'Professional font'? lmao
Plenty of free fonts have all of the features you've listed, and plenty of non-free fonts don't.
> There’s a reason so many articles exist with titles like “Google Fonts That Don’t Suck”. Most of them do.
Again 'so many' and 'most'... you should provide specific (at least approximate) numbers, otherwise this says nothing about how many good free fonts are actually out there.
> Arguing that all design is BS is just lazy
Well I didn't say that, pretending that I did is pretty lazy tho.
> I highly recommend practicaltypography.com, a free web book that discusses all of this and more, including why system fonts are bad and why a professional typeface is worth paying for.
Oh geez! A FREE book which tells you why you should pay for 'professional' fonts while at the same time selling them to you with affiliate links! Thank you sir!
You should care if you're being combatative, but, even more importantly, quoting previous comments the way you're doing doesn't work well on HN and is also a flamewar trope. Everybody can read the comments you're responding to. Just refer back to them in prose. A single quote, maybe 2 in a long comment, fine, but what you're doing now creates the impression that you're sort of rebutting what the previous commenter said as you read them, sentence by sentence, which is a tell that you're not actually thinking about what they said.
Also: they're pretty clearly wrong, so you shouldn't need any of this to refute them.
I am rebutting what the previous commenter said, sentence by sentence (almost), I don't know why that tells you that I'm not actually thinking about what they said though. Did I misunderstand or misrepresent something they said?
I'm not going to argue with you, but I just want to point out that the person I was responding to specifically used the phrase "system supported fonts". That's why I mentioned Calibri.
> '..freely available and/or system supported fonts.'
Not just 'system supported fonts' (whatever that means), and not just Calibri. That's why your 'use Calibri for everything' example is absurd and does not at all address the point they made.
The last sentence is the variety that is super tempting to make but counterproductive because it shuts down discussion or poisons it thereafter its made to impress bystanders not actually communicate with the person.
Agree that it might not be the best, but seems like a fairly appropriate response for someone trying to back up their rhetoric with 'thousands of books out there'. How is it 'made to impress bystanders'?
Who cares? They're part of a line of argumentation that dunks on the typography work of Matthew Carter. This is very much the same thing as a thread on industrial design dunking on Dieter Rams. You don't get angry at that kind of argument; you laugh at it.
Oh I was never angry, I was enjoying the argument (maybe that makes me combative, oh well), and I was completely open to being proven wrong and thereby becoming more informed on the topic... alas...
Something tells me that some designers care about fonts a heck of a lot more than most consumers do. As a consumer, I care about legibility above all else. There are plenty of metrics that affect that, but many of the freely available (albeit, not necessarily free) fonts are perfectly fine on that front. More bluntly, some of those freely available fonts are going to be better than the vast majority of fonts that you can pay for because: (a) companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have invested in their development or licensing to ensure their customers have access to high quality fonts with coverage for most languages; and (b) they have wide availability, since font substitution is going to have a much larger impact upon the perceived quality of a document than its use of quality fonts.
Maybe this pedantic snobbery will matter again when we switch back to creative mode, but it all seems highly elitist right now while many are trying to just survive.
I admire your passion, but... as someone who is not deeply interested in fonts, I view them in largely functional terms. Can I read it? Does it look ok?
Programming language choice has an aesthetic side, but it is also very much a functional concern. Can I write secure code? Will it be performant? Will it be maintainable?
Different languages represent different functional tradeoffs. Are fonts really the same kind of thing? IOW, how would you make a choice between using Arial vs. Helvetica?
Arial v Helvetica is an interesting example, because Arial was designed basically as a cost-efficient alternative to Helvetica. So, the reason you'd choose between the two is exactly the thing the original comment was complaining about – licensing! They were designed to be metrically compatible... meaning, the character widths and spaces are exactly the same. This means that switching to Arial won't affect the layout of your document. This was more important when things were more analog, but it's still important with digital documents: for example, it could mess up the number of pages, which would affect meta content or create line breaks that seem meaningful but aren't. Additionally, having things like a widow (a word by itself on a new line) can disrupt the visual flow and draw focus to or away from content in ways you don't desire.
But just because those two typefaces are quite similar (and the reason to pick between them is largely financial/convenience) doesn't mean you'd never want to have more fine-grained control over the text you're working with.
You mentioned security. When I'm editing this comment, 0 and O are very different (the zero has a slash through it), however when I hit save they look quite similar. (But because we're all using system fonts on HN, it might be different for you). While it's often just a stylistic choice, in many situations the two characters would be indistinguishable and that would be an issue, which is why someone might choose a typeface where characters are significantly different. Think a password you have to transcribe.
If you know your font will be used in a quite small size, you may want one that is optimized for being read at tiny sizes. If you're displaying something technical, a monowidth font is better suited.
And all of this focused on utility for the most part; I'm leaving out all the reasons you'd want it for stylistic reasons. If you're trying to make people feel at ease, you may want typeface where the end of the strokes are rounded, for example. Sometimes you want people to feel a certain way, in the same way you modulate your tone when talking.
Very few system fonts are any good. Would you use Arial instead of Helvetica Neue? I certainly wouldn't. Put two posters side-by-side and you'd notice the Helvetica one as looking more professional, even without any design background.
Additionally, very few system fonts include all the weights. Fonts aren't just come in a single weight. The font you use for a giant page-filling title is generally skinnier than the font used for a caption.
Good design creates a reaction, such as causing you to buy something or interacting more with something or whatever, even for people that say they don't care about design.
An obviously false statement which you can't possibly back up.
> Would you use Arial instead of Helvetica Neue? I certainly wouldn't. Put two posters side-by-side and you'd notice the Helvetica one as looking more professional, even without any design background.
First of all that's just completely your own subjective opinion. Second, there are many other free sans-serif fonts out there to choose from (examples[1]).
> Good design creates a reaction, such as causing you to buy something or interacting more with something or whatever
'Design' can encompass many things, but can you show me some data that backs up your claim that slight differences in fonts will make a difference in product quality/performance/revenue/etc? Because I have seen a loooot of data that says it's almost always completely irrelevant.
This is just clearly wrong. Even Georgia and Verdana are very serious works of typography. The Cleartype fonts hold their own against modern text faces. San Francisco and New York are also obviously strong fonts. These are gigantic companies that take typography seriously, they can easily afford to invest in competent system fonts, and they both obviously have.
They updated it for the sequel, and one example doesn't nullify thousands of years of design.
But to go down that path from a logical standpoint... Papyrus isn't on my computer (OSX) for whatever reason, and it doesn't come on Linux. Papyrus isn't a free, public font... it's licensed by its owner (ITC), so the only reason you can use it on your computer is because someone is paying a license for you to see it.
I guess it comes down to how you view the concept of "the medium is the message". Should the tone be set by the creator of the software / writer of the blog post / etc, or should the end user choose one typeface for everything (or have fine-grained control over everything they read and view?)
I don't think this makes much sense as an argument, because you can have it either way with the status quo. The question isn't whether creators can use typesetting expressively; they clearly can, with a degree of freedom and optionality that would have blown me away when I started font nerding back in the 1990s. The question is whether I should sympathize with designers who are irritated by the licensing terms for Gotham or Brandon Grotesque (or whomever is doing per-impression licensing these days). I do not, and I think I'm on solid ground.
Yes, and no, but why and when? What makes any particular typeface more or less important had it been something different?
When I was younger and a bit more haughty about design, I would have agreed, but now I feel like I need more to substantiate the claim, even thought I feel like I agree.
> I'd argue that complaining about font prices is less like a Hermes bag, and more like complaining about high-end ingredients when a supermarket has cheap stuff. Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer.
This also needs a bit more. In what cases would some dish suffer "deeply" simply from having used commodity ingredients (a quality that's a core tenant in many famous designers' approaches)? You could more easily argue that something isn't the same as another, or perhaps less appealing visually, or perhaps less nutritionally dense, but it all seems a bit specious to me. Some cases would be significant, such as the choice of a garden tomato over a store tomato, but that's hardly a high-end concern, and why would high-end concerns be all that important anyway?
My opinion is that design is as important as the problems it solves or the outcome it produces, and the existence and selection of appropriate typefaces can be a core component in that, it would not be easy to make a strong value oriented argument for the discrete choice of one expensive typeface over another commodity typeface unless one evidently solves a problem better, or its value is already established because of the association with an existing identity that already uses it.
That's not to say they aren't worth paying for, or that licensing them isn't an issue, it's just kind of a debatable question how much one over another is worth or how important it is, much like art in general or other creative works.
If you often use custom fonts that aren't preinstalled on typical systems, I can't help but wonder whether you also painstakingly choose fonts for non-latin character/non-latin based languages?
I'll admit opening a can of worms on purpose, but if you're going for the "high-end", ignoring the i18n implications seems like a crime on its own, and yet most people don't really have the design expertise to evaluate whether a font looks good in another totally foreign language...
Non-Latin? Well, OK, Greek and Cyrillic are close enough to Latin to be able to design the font for them following approximately the same style which apply to the Latin characters. You can make a Cyrillic Tahoma or a Greek Signika in line with the Latin variants. I'd say that this is the reasonable limit of non-latin support.
If you take Hebrew, Korean, Georgian, Armenian, Thai, hiragana, katakana, you're in trouble. They all have different proportions, traditions, connections. You can stylize them a bit to be reminiscent of the way the Latin font is made, but you'll have hard time making a Hebrew font with large serifs like Bodoni, and will have hard time making it materially different from Times New Roman in a convincing way. It's better to make a separate typeface.
Arabic / Persian / Urdu, or hanji are their own worlds altogether, hardly comparable to Western typography.
Branding requires being distinctive, mixing novel visual and other aspects in a pleasing way.
As far as I have been able to tell no major platform ships with the universal font of fonts (full coverage of all possible fonts with 4.5Mb seed) “AnyStyleYouWant” font.
And none of the fonts they do ship have the “distinctive” feature.
Please keep your "branding" out of my UI. What I want from text in the apps I use is legibility first and foremost, not them screaming the brand at me every second I'm staring at them.
There is a large number of free qualify fonts available at fonts.google.com, many of them are free for commercial use outside the web. There is also a handful of pretty good fonts not included in that collection but also freely available. (This is on top of good collections of fonts shipped with major OSes.)
There is a number of free fonts which are also free for commercial use, but are clearly inadequate for serious typographic work, or only contain highly stylized glyphs. They may still be perfectly usable for a game, or a mobile app which is not typography-heavy. In many cases, the shortcomings are only visible at paper resolution, or only in print as opposed to screen.
Then, there is a number of not very expensive fonts that cost $50-100 per face. If you really badly need a font exactly like that for a commercial project, and $200-300 is a prohibitively expensive for a permanent license you obtain, how much is the commercial project worth? Is it worth sweating over that very particular font?
> Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer.
This heavily depends. As I mentioned before, cheaper materials did not always mean shittier, especially when it comes to cooking. Around here, healthy food is still cheaper (especially the ingredients) than junk food, although the recent increase in prices (of everything) is wild.
The OP didn't say they didn't want to pay, they're saying there's been a shift toward per-impression pricing which is often unsustainable for even the most lucrative apps.
So, using the OP's own comparison, I should be able to pay a one off "saffron purchase", and then be able to use as much saffron as I want from the supermarket for every meal I ever make in the future? ;-)
No, because Saffron is a physical commodity with inherent production costs, supply chain logistics, and a finite supply. A better analogy would be that if you bought a saffron crocus, you shouldn't have to pay a monthly fee to harvest it.
This doesn't mean anything. Things are not generally sold at their bill of materials cost. If you don't want to pay what Monotype is charging, don't use Monotype faces. It's exactly that simple. There a gajillion alternative faces, and a very large number of them are of high quality.
To buy fonts you have to care about design but not too much. If you do then you'll draw your text so it's a unique "font" instead of buying a premade font that other people can also buy.
My problem with this analogy is that there are dozens if not hundreds of free typefaces that are exceptionally high quality and have stood the test of time.
The "problem" with free typefaces isn't their quality, it's their ubiquity. Since everyone can use them, they are used everywhere. Licensing something less common can help your product stand out from the crowd.
Or you could try implementing good features to try to stand out from the crowd.
Frankly, non-default fonts outside of the logo are a red flag to me. They signal a team that has put form so far over function that the function is almost guaranteed to not be fit for purpose.
If they're profoundly important for the design of your money-making app, the principle of "fuck you, pay me" applies. If you're making $50,000 every year and you couldn't do that without the design and you couldn't do the design without the font, pay up.
If they're profoundly important for the design of your free software app... we all know how likely it is for a free software app to have good design. You'd be the first.
Almost every font, style, pattern, component used in any new app today has already been designed, implemented, redesigned and reimplemented 20 times over. 'The importance of design' and all of the associated rhetorical BS only really serve to keep redundant (imo) designers employed.
> like complaining about high-end ingredients when a supermarket has cheap stuff. Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer.
Can you actually make an objective argument for why certain fonts are more high-quality than existing free/open fonts, or how free/open fonts will make a product deeply suffer? I'd wager you can't.
I've worked closely with many designers behind some very popular 'nice' award-winning apps. I've listened to endless rhetorical BS about how 'this specific element of the design is incredibly important and any deviation is a major hit to the product quality'. These same designers very very rarely even notice when an incorrect font/color, styling/layout is used, while arguing that any such deviation will ruin customer trust destroy the app. Complete BS.
I don't know what a Hermès is or connotates, but I think the complaint is as much about the artificial and seemingly arbitrary restrictions as opposed to purely the price.
You can try to create a Veblen good out of a digital artifact and play the all or nothing game, but it's proven very hard to restrict something which can be copied at no cost and with no limitations.
When you buy expensive clothes, it would be silly for the seller to try and license them to be only worn on Mondays, or at dress-code events, or based on your taxable income. People are not going to take your "license" seriously, even if you'd have some legal grounds and might well win a legal argument.
I have a great deal of admiration for artists and designers, and I know that creating a multiple-variant typeface with great applicability that's either historically correct or truly innovative is an art form.
This reminds me of Napster-era debates about artists' rights versus distribution.
It’s not uncommon to require clients to develop a relationship with the retailer before they’re allowed to buy the more exclusive goods. It’s not the same as the licensing analogy but it’s close.
Imagine needing to spend 300% of an item’s cost at the retailer before you’re allowed the chance to buy the thing you actually want.
> When you buy expensive clothes, it would be silly for the seller to try and license them to be only worn on Mondays, or at dress-code events, or based on your taxable income. People are not going to take your "license" seriously, even if you'd have some legal grounds and might well win a legal argument.
That's why the usual approach, especially in this industry, is to not give people choice in the first place - this is achieved by renting, instead of selling.
Clothes as a Service is already a thing. A CaaS with excessively specific restriction of use? Might not be - yet. No doubt someone will try it.
If Hermès did forbid me from carrying my (hypothetical) wallet more than 3 times a week, I simply would not buy that wallet. It would not become a moral crusade.
Why? Everybody can just not buy the wallet if they care about this term of use. Who's being harmed?
This isn't nitpicking. At some point you're really effectively just arguing that there should be a ceiling on what you can charge for a typeface. That's not an argument that respects the art and craft of type design; it's one that privileges convenience.
> Why? Everybody can just not buy the wallet if they care about this term of use. Who's being harmed?
Either because it's ridiculous and fun to laugh at, or to scare other companies off the idea, or both.
It being a luxury product that people can avoid is not a reason to keep my mouth shut.
> At some point you're really effectively just arguing that there should be a ceiling on what you can charge for a typeface. That's not an argument that respects the art and craft of type design; it's one that privileges convenience.
Okay, to switch back to typefaces, I don't get the impression they're complaining about the high end, I get the impression they're complaining about the average.
And if an entire class of product suddenly becomes luxury with onerous terms... that sucks! Do complain! It was working fine before!
But that clearly isn't happening. You have never had more access to high-end typefaces than you do today. What people are mad about is the licensing attached to --- literally --- the Hermès of type design. To get higher-level than the targets of these complaints you have to get into bespoke design.
This came up earlier in the thread, and I kept someone else on the hook on this: I honestly think that it would be a good thing for the world if font licensing got more onerous, not less. Type design is a very difficult field to make a living in, and the world could use more of it. The social cost of making high-end type more expensive is negative, not positive.
> What people are mad about is the licensing attached to --- literally --- the Hermès of type design.
Hmm, okay. If that's true then OP is just wrong.
The problem is this argument wasn't clear from your initial comment. You claimed that there were plenty of excellent free options, while they claimed that the market had generally gone to very onerous pricing. Both of those can be true at the same time.
But if most of the market hasn't done that, and they're only looking at the top, then okay they're wrong.
No, not a ceiling, but rather less baroque terms of use / price structure, I'd say. It's like licensing software per CPU core, and / or with a separate license with separate conditions for every of the two dozen components of software. These have been ridiculed because people who end up working with that get bothered and want to vent. Should not be a moral crusade though; a crusade to "liberate" someone else's property, as opposed to creating and maintaining something free, has a different name.
In my experience part of the pain is having some decision-maker or stake-holder getting married to a design during the mockup phase. A lot of the mockup generators will use fonts you'll have to license later for free in the mockup.
I feel like you're arguing against a point GP entirely didn't make. GP is saying there's a market mismatch here - there's money on the table that font makers are ignoring, and simultaneously apps end up using uglier default fonts. Both parties could benefit from meeting in the middle.
There are very few fonts that exist in all the major platforms. But there are excellent free and open source fonts that you can use. I also want to point out that if you make an "app" and publish it on a platform like appstore, you are basically a slave to the platform.
I'd say the same about shows and movies, which is where the supermajority of this conversation is typically focused, especially given how much free content is over YouTube.
Do you consider fonts largely useless, overpriced and primarily directed at customers who seek to display status symbols? Because that's the analogy, I'm not sure I agree.
But the prices are off the charts, and it's the usual private-equity buying up the competition & their IP and then squeezing as much as they can. Not sure why that's worth rooting for.
Well if the same font could be independently discovered, would your view change at all? Of course at high resolutions this is unlikely but I feel like if I made the same image within 5 pixels wide and 9 pixels high and two colors as some font it might be accused of being similar, much like with some accusations in music.
The fonts loaded on one machine are typically not loaded reliably on all machines, so you need to distribute fonts with your application. Doing this is probably a violation of the license that all those "free fonts" were distributed under, so your only options are:
1. Public Domain Fonts
2. Fonts that cost money
The set of public domain fonts is pretty small and most of them are low quality - not all, thankfully - and out of the ones that don't suck a lot of them only support the latin character set.
As for fonts that cost money, just to give you one example, I recently asked a foundry what it would cost to license a font for my indie game. Their quote was $1100/yr with a ceiling of 300k copies sold (so I'd need to come back and pay them more on a yearly basis and the cost would go up if I was successful). This was only for 3 variants - regular, italic and medium - and only for the latin character set. For one typeface.
Certainly if I was throwing around millions of dollars I could pay that without blinking, but it's far out of reach for independent developers (and they know I'm independent)
Lots of games distribute "baked fonts", where the ttf/otf is statically rendered into a bunch of texture atlases and they ship the atlases instead of the font. Many font licenses I've seen don't permit this kind of use, so I suspect a lot of games are actually in violation of their font licenses, if they paid to license their fonts at all.
Hell, just the other day I prepared a PowerPoint presentation for work using one of the stock Office fonts and then I opened it in Office on another machine and the font was missing...
There is a large range of permissive licensing between public domain and "fonts that cost money". Free as in freedom Linux distros ship a sizable set of fonts, and I'm sure most of them are licensed permissively.
What? There's an endless supply of permissively licensed fonts, eg on Google Fonts. Many of them are actually pretty good. Yes, you'll find some bad ones too.
I've been meaning to roll my own font with https://github.com/glyphr-studio/Glyphr-Studio-2 but I've never gotten around to it. Then you can build on top of the public domain fonts or properly license fonts on Google Fonts.
I guess you’ve never worked with one of those designers whose friend’s cofounder’s VC’s boyfriend shops at Neeman Marcus. Try telling one of them they have to use a normal legible tried and true font :s
> I guess these font sellers imagine there’s still some app boom - a Klondike rush with developers bathing in dollars.
The way this works is the design team picks some font, uses it on all of the design proposals, gets it approved by management, and then only later does a developer realize it’s a paid font they’ve been asked to put in the app. The teams want to avoid going back for design change approvals so eventually they just give up and pay the money.
It’s not developers picky boutique expensive fonts, in my experience. It’s the designers who don’t think about the consequences because by they point it’s off their plate.
To be fair though, there’s so many open source fonts out there of good quality that you don’t have to pay anyone to use their font. Why go against copyright laws when you can just use fonts like Roboto (or really, anything on Google Fonts) for free?
As a mostly now digital designer I get it... but also realize that digital has the capacity to scale instantly where print doesnt. Want to get 40 million editions out digitally? Gimme a sec. Physically? Gonna need to get some investment capital and a few years ramp up.
This maybe isn't relevant to your point, but the story in question is from long before mobile apps.
Also, just for anyone cruising the comments before reading the story, it is more about the "You wouldn't steal a car" PSA's from >20-ish years ago. I don't recall there being any explicit advocacy for font licensing anywhere in it.
By using a font that is guaranteed to be provided by the system on which the app is running. Both Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android all make such guarantees.
Linux DEs generally don't, but perhaps they should, given that open fonts with decent quality and extensive coverage are out there. Something like the Noto family.
And if you generate a set of bitmaps/sprites of individual glyphs from the font (e.g. to use as a bitmap font in a game), is that different to shipping an image with more specific uses of the font baked in, e.g. a logo/title image?
I've only purchased one font, which I use in my editor and terminal, so I don't have to worry much about the license. I can't be bothered to use custom fonts for any projects. With all the licensing considerations it just makes me cut out the whole idea to simplify my life.
Jokes aside, I'm not very impressed with this single color font art. Maybe in 30 years we will have 16 color fonts?
The color fonts currently work in Firefox and Edge, Safari support SBIX, Chrome on Android has CBDT
I can barely find a website that has an example. The ones I found have a few characters or a single sentence, very few fonts and they are not very pretty. Some of the implementations warn that the client might catch fire.
I haven't bought a ton of fonts, but iirc the licensing from US Graphics was pretty reasonable for software distribution. It was something like an extra $200 for app usage for an indie developer.
I researched it for Russia recently and apparently the law is much stricter about fonts here than in the US. Both the character shapes and the "code" are copyrightable so you ain't getting away with converting it into a different format either. Companies did get sued over this and did have to pay millions of rubles in fines and licensing fees for their past usage. Not sure about individuals but I wouldn't try my luck with any non-free fonts made by Russian designers.
I would suggest not pushing your luck with webfonts though, because in that case you are distributing the actual copyrighted "code" of the font, not just the minimally protected shapes that it outputs. There are services which crawl the web actively looking for pirated webfonts on behalf of foundries (and their lawyers).
I had this happen to a client and even though they had both the web and print licenses they were hit with a 50k suite because the font file was malformed somehow. I'm not sure how it shook out but I hope they didn't pay a god damn cent.
How robust is that identification? Does it just look for file hashes or identical character shapes? I imagine it is trivial to repackage a font file to break the hash fingerprint.
font licensing feels like it never caught up with how software actually gets made now. charging more for app use than for mass print always seemed backwards, especially when indie devs are scraping by and a font costs more than your backend. no wonder people end up using “free alternatives” without looking too hard at where they came from.
I am of the opinion that the licenses for fonts in software are too expensive, but why is the pricing ‘backwards’? Book publishers don’t make a lot of profit, while software developers do.
> Book publishers don’t make a lot of profit, while software developers do.
Do you have a citation for that?
Printing a book costs just about nothing, it’s astonishingly cheap to print a quality book in volume. Author royalties are not that high (I suppose famous authors whose name alone sell books is another story), then you have retail margins and overhead.
The top three book publishers’ have sales in the low billions with operating margins in the 10 - 20% range.
It is a healthy industry even if it is smaller than it used to be.
The one problem with books is that shipping an individual book to a single consumer costs a far more than printing the book, but there is zero shipping and zero printing costs for ebooks, just the retailer margin.
Book publishing is at least as bad as VC work. You publish a lot of books to have a catalog, and a few books make inordinately more money than the rest which keeps the lights on. New printings sound cheap enough, but a lot of books don’t get many of those. The long tail is very flat.
And as for the authors, most would make a lot more money tutoring for the same number of hours of effort they put into the book. Those appearance fees might make it better, but how many people get those?
That is an absolutely brilliant turn of events – strong evidence that the font in an anti-piracy campaign was itself arguably a copyright-infringing knock-off.
Someone should sue FACT for copyright infringement – and refuse to settle.
How does that square with this article, which says that the music was composed by Dutch musician Melchior Rietveldt specifically for the ad? (And that they failed to pay him properly for the use of the music.)
A typeface design, in the U.S., no, but the digital font file comprising outline data and instructions, according to current U.S. law, for an overview of current case law and a proposal see:
There's no evidence XBAND Rough was extracted from a digital source bit-for-bit, unless someone can point to any?
It seems like it was just a hobbyist project to recreate the look of the font from the anti-piracy ads? Which is 100% legal.
Edit: OK, so the original font appears to be "FF Confidential"? Why didn't the post even mention that? So maybe it is a digital clone, which would be illegal. But then strange that there aren't any DMCA takedowns of it on major font sites?
1. Catapult Entertainment made/commissioned XBAND Rough as a clone of Confidential for their use somewhere (promotional materials, PC software, who knows?). The font file contains the text "Copyright 1996 Catapult Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved".
2. The "You wouldn't steal a car" campaign pirated Catapult's copyrighted font file. I think they got away with it because Catapult was no longer in business at that point. They were acquired by Mpath Interactive in 1996 and Mpath's IP got acquired by GameSpy in 2000.
"It looks the same" is completely different than having been directly extracted from digital source.
If the digital source is the only thing that can be copyrighted, then you have to prove the digital source is what was used inappropriately. If you can't prove that, either because it didn't happen or because there's no technological way to prove it, then you can't prove copyright infringement.
Ages ago, I consulted on a case where a converted font was included in a product --- it was even simpler than https://luc.devroye.org/kinch.html since no transformations were applied --- just had to figure out which version of which font editor was used to open up the font file and then which settings were used to re-generate the font in the new format used for the infringing product.
If I were going to knock it off I'd duplicate the splotching exactly, too. I'd prepare as sample as a bitmap, use any of the various raster-to-vector tracers on it to get an SVG, clean up the SVG of any conversion artifacts, then make it into a type format. (Heck, there's probably a fun problem in here to train an algorithm to do the cleanup and conversion. You could probably knock-off the hinting and ligatures, too.)
XBAND Rough could not have been inspired by those ads, as the OP shows the ads are using XBAND, and not FF Confidential, the original tyepface it cloned.
If it were the same file, it wouldn't be a "knock-off." It would be something like Optifonts. Very frowned upon, but definitely not illegal. Also, the kerning is usually trash, there will be way too many nodes in the vectors, and things may be missing. Annoying to work with, but in the case of Optifonts, free (because they're long out of business.)
Maybe not in the US, but fonts do enjoy copyright protection in at least some European markets.[1] I frequently encountered this campaign on DVDs for rent in the local Blockbuster equivalents, so I don't think it is entirely theoretical infringement, either.
In the US you can't copyright the shape of a font. You can copyright the programmatic description of a font.
Design patents have been awarded for fonts. Trademark and trade dress protections could apply to the specific use of a font but not the font itself. The name of a font itself can be protected by trademark, as well.
Edit: Back in the mid-90s versions of Corel Draw came with a Truetype editor. A friend of mine made "knock off" versions of fonts they liked from magazines, etc, and made them freely available on his ISP-provided web space. They drew them by hand, using printed samples as the inspiration.
Over the years they got some angry messages from a few "type people" who didn't like that they'd made freely available knock-offs of various fonts. (I remember that "Keedy Sans" is one they knocked-off and got a particularly angry email about.)
Further aside: My fiend made a sans serif typeface that has a distinct pattern of "erosion" at the edges and voids within the letters. It's easy to tell when it's the font he made. For the last 30 years I've kept samples of the various places I've seen it used, both on the Internet and on physical articles. I find it so amazing that a TTF file made by a kid in Corel Draw in 1994 or 1995 ended up being used in advertisements, on packaging, etc.
But you can Copyright the Name of a font. But yes long standing rule says you can copyright how letters & numbers look. Note that if you make a font that contains your own “artwork’ that does not represent a letter or number you can get protection for that.
And only fairly recently (in the past 30 years—I forget when Adobe won this court case) the courts ruled you can protect the code for generating a fonts look from being copied.
You can, entirely legally, make a copy of any font and distribute it freely.
You can't copy the font files themselves, but you can make visually indistinguishable new fonts with the same shapes because the shapes are not protected by copyright.
Additionally though, some fonts have design patents, which does protect the shape. Unlike copyright which has absolutely crazy expiration (like 150 years occasionally?) these patents only cover 15 to 20 years or shorter if abandoned.
So if I already have the file (legally acquired or not), I'm free to use it for print? Cause obviously distributing T-shirts isn't distributing font files?
> was itself arguably a copyright-infringing knock-off.
In US law, there is no such thing. The shape of a glyph (or many) isn't even slightly copyrightable. This is settled law. Fonts (on computers) have a special status that makes them semi-copyrightable in that some jackass judge from the 1980s called them "computer programs" and so they have the same protection as software... but this won't protect against knockoffs.
Is this fair? It actually takes a lot of work (I assume) to design letter's shapes. Of course, not counting those who just trace 16-th century font without paying a compensation.
> Of course, not counting those who just trace 16-th century font without paying a compensation
I can't tell which way you mean this, but that sounds similar to the situation with most public domain musical compositions - the manuscripts may be completely open but a specific typesetting can still under copyright. And like that case, "just" tracing a font / typesetting a composition is still a fair amount of work.
>Under the Feist ruling in the US, mere collections of facts are considered unoriginal and thus not protected by copyright, no matter how much work went into collating them.
This person isn't just collecting existing letter shapes; inventing a new letter shapes would be protected by copyright?
You aren't inventing a new letter shapes - letters already exist. You are modifying how they look, and that's not considered creative enough.
There are lots of things that can't be copyrighted.
For example you can't copyright an anatomy drawing: https://www.skeletaldrawing.com/licensing (i.e. the layout of the bones, etc) but you can copyright your specific drawing - but someone else could draw in the same style and not violate your copyright.
Same here: You can't copyright the shape of the letters, but you can copyright you specific ttf program (expression), but someone else can make the same letter shapes if they want.
You can say the same about drawing of a cat: you are not inventing new animal here. But for some weird reason cats are copyrighted and letters are not.
There are many ways to draw the same letter, as there are many ways to draw a cat.
Also if one draws letters that look like cats, will they fall under copyright protection?
If someone draws a cat, and the next person draws basically the same cat, there is no copyright infringement.
You need something "extra", some kind of style that is distinct.
I'm not saying your drawing has no copyright - it does, if someone reproduces it exactly that's illegal. I'm saying if someone makes the same type of drawing, in the same style, that's not infringement - even if they looked at yours, as long as they drew it themselves.
Are fonts really programs? Is a digital image file also a program?
A font file is more like a config that’s used by your OS to render something, there’s no real interactivity in fonts (except some ligatures but those are just static tables, right?).
We’re talking about copyright here. A typeface on its own isn’t copyrightable. The judge ruled that turning a typeface into a digital font involves writing a nontrivial computer program, which is a creative work under US copyright law. That simply is true. It doesn’t matter whether you can write “apps” in TrueType; you can write digital fonts in it.
Many things are copyrightable that shouldn't be. When you can spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress to get them to extend copyright protections beyond reason, that tends to happen.
In the United States, it is settled precedent that typefaces are not copyrightable. That doesn't change just because they became digital in 1984.
If one didn't know better, one could conclude the history of this ad campaign suggests it was performance art done by creatives ideologically opposed to the client.
I'm sure these artist-loving folks just paid the very cheapest ad/video agency they could find to make this that seemed capable of completing the project, and that agency was the kind of place that does sloppy stuff like that (many do, haha).
I would happily pay for any font if I could get individual weights for say $5-$10 and entire families for $20-100 with any usage I want (print, web, etc). I feel like font foundries would print money this way. But for most projects, $300+ for a nice family (that can only be used in a hyper-specific context) is just insane when many free or cheaper alternatives exist.
Used to waste time and money with foundry stuff until Google Fonts caught up. Now I typically source something from there unless it's essential to the design.
I suspect it is probably right that they would find it more profitable to sell 100 copies for $10 than 1 copy for $1000. But I do wonder, it could be that the occasional $10,000 sale to a large company pays more in the long run for less hassle. It’s hard to know. Do any creative agencies release their sales information?
I’d say there should at least be a small niece for a company to profit off the back of less expensive more reasonably licensed font sales. I don’t know how many lawyers a small company would need to do this though. Would they be sued by Adobe (either for fonts that look similar, or with pointless lawsuits just to wear them out?)
Part of the value may be in how exclusive the font seems. So in that view 1 sale of $1000 is more valuable because it’s more exclusive. Basically, one potential attribute of fonts is they’re a luxury not a commodity.
I don't know if this actually counts as copyright infringement, since typeface shapes are not eligible for copyright in the U.S. (disclaimer: IANAL) so depending on how it was cloned, it might be legal.
The more amusing detail, to me, is whether or not XBAND Rough is related to the XBAND peripheral for video game consoles in the 90s. (Fascinating story, it was an add-on that enabled multiplayer over a phoneline on the SEGA Genesis/MegaDrive and Super Nintendo/Super Famicom.) Seems silly, however there is at least one source that seems to corroborate this idea, crediting the font to Catapult Entertainment, the company behind the XBAND:
Thanks for emphasising the US perspective, because it matters.
IAAL outside the US, and I'm aware in UK and EU law copyright can subsist in typefaces, and there are specific provisions relating to them. Since FACT is a UK Org, taking UK law as an example, see ref. []
I personally find it a good example of aging law. It's quite difficult to reconcile the law as drafted (in 1987) with modern digital font uses. Is a PDF with embedded fonts "material produced by typesetting", or is it an "article specifically designed or adapted for producing material in a particular typeface"? Arguably it could be either.
I'm not aware of this ever having been considered by a court.
> I personally find it a good example of aging law. It's quite difficult to reconcile the law as drafted (in 1987) with modern digital font uses.
Bizarrely, it seems like the precedent has only gotten stronger since 1987. It was re-affirmed again by the Code of Federal Regulations, § 202.1[1], in 1992. Honestly, I don't fully understand why. I know that U.S. copyright law generally limits the ability to copyright things that do not involve sufficient originality or creativity, but while all typeface outlines are the same basic shapes, there's still plenty of room for creativity.
I also know that the U.S. is also not entirely alone in generally considering typefaces ineligible for copyright protection; I believe Japan also has a similar position. Maybe eventually, it will shift.
> IAAL outside the US, and I'm aware in UK and EU law copyright can subsist in typefaces, and there are specific provisions relating to them. Since FACT is a UK Org, taking UK law as an example, see ref.
Oh, I honestly didn't even realize FACT was a UK organization; I didn't really know a whole lot about them other than the commercial.
That makes this situation a bit more awkward, as Catapult was, IIRC, based in Cupertino, so Catapult may have not been breaking any U.S. copyright laws, even though their typeface would presumably be illicit by UK law. That said, they were possibly breaking Dutch copyright laws, and I'm not sure what happens there. I suppose that comes down to the nitty gritty of how international copyright treaties work, and I am way out of my depth there.
It is related. The font file contains the text "Copyright 1996 Catapult Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved". I'm not sure where it comes from because the SNES/Genesis/Saturn versions of the service didn't use it. Maybe it comes from the short-lived PC XBAND service?
> It is related. The font file contains the text "Copyright 1996 Catapult Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved".
Wow! I should've thought to check that.
> I'm not sure where it comes from because the SNES/Genesis/Saturn versions of the service didn't use it. Maybe it comes from the short-lived PC XBAND service?
My guess was going to be that it was used in marketing copy, but that doesn't explain how it wound up distributed apparently freely. The idea that it is related to the PC XBAND service seems likely to me, though. The dates line up, based on this press release:
I find it pretty funny that the American legal system explicitly doesn't copyright fonts (which are quite obviously creative works, in my opinion) but still enforces software patents.
Copyright for most (if not all) fonts seems like something that just shouldn’t work. We want things in the public domain, like Shakespeare, and we want derivative works protected. Fonts are tiny differences on public domain work that 90% of people can’t tell. You wouldn’t want Disney to claim every pencil stroke difference on Mikey’s to be subject to different copyright terms, it would become a kind of perpetual copyright strategy. If there are true technical improvements to the way we represent letters, they should be covered by patents, with their shorter terms.
How do you encourage people to continue making new typefaces if anyone could use them immediately? FWIW, it does take significant time to design individual typefaces. It’s not just a set of characters: it’s the character in lowercase and uppercase, how letters appear differently when adjacent to certain other letters, punctuation, etc.
A significant amount of time goes into the process.
What saddens me is that a lot of people are so ignorant that they don't even realize a font is something that takes creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort to design.
I remember trying to explain to some colleagues why I paid about 100 bucks for the font I use and why I wouldn’t share it with them and they just couldn’t get it.
(It’s Berkeley mono).
I don’t even know how many glyphs it is (it’s thousands) but for something I’m looking at for 6-8 hours a day, every single day and is the absolute peak of perfection (at least to me), 100 bucks seems like a fucking bargain to me.
shrug I guess these folks never sold something they made completely by themselves maybe.
>shrug I guess these folks never sold something they made completely by themselves maybe.
Not saying font designers shouldn't get paid, but they mostly aren't making things "completely by themselves", they are mostly making derivative works from things that exist, without any consideration for the original authors.
What do you suppose they should do to the original authors? Perhaps the original author is Claude Garamond who died in the sixteenth century? Or the unknown workers who carved the inscription at Trajan's column in the second century AD?
When people say "make completely by themselves", they don't mean that were not influenced by literally no prior works. Artists can say they painted an original work entirely by themselves without needing a pedant to mention that they were probably influenced by prior work.
Clearly nothing based on Latin script can be original, which itself is based on the Etruscan Old italic alphabet, which itself it based on the Euboean alphabet — ergo, any typeface developed after say the 8th century BC is just a silly derivative.
Everything is derivative, there is nothing new under the sun, and your argument proves nothing.
>at a high enough level of abstraction, all creative work is derivative.
Sure, but with fonts you have basically one level between the font they are 'developing' and the one they are copying from. There is work involved, but very little of it is creative work.
The "peak of perfection" does not support even just European languages, not having full coverage even for Latin scripts. But it's a "love letter for the golden age of computing", and the golden age had massive problems with scripts for languages other than English, so maybe it's intentional.
Hey, Berkeley Mono supports most Western European languages, can you tell me what's missing? I can add it. Btw, the tagline is about the aesthetics. :)
Hi Neil, I'm not that person you replied to but in my projects I require Cyrillic glyphs for Russian and Ukrainian texts. Also when checking out your website just now, I wasn't able to add a Berkeley Mono App License module in your ordering system. I assume I need a App License to embed the font in my app? But I also can't seem to find any information about the app license itself on your site as well.
Cyrillic is not supported so Berkeley Mono might not be suitable for your application. Are you building a Web app (Webfonts) or a Desktop/Mobile app (App license)? Please email me.
Is it a mistake, on page 4 of the linked datasheet, that "SemiBold" is shown for two different weights? I can't help but think that something like "DemiBold" was what the lighter weight was supposed to be labeled.
Yes, that's a typo. Need to redo the entire datasheet and possibly find a way to automate it using reportlab or some other PDF library. Right now, it is in InDesign and it is a pain to keep updating it.
> shrug I guess these folks never sold something they made completely by themselves maybe
Ignoring that they likely didn’t make it completely by themselves (standing on the shoulders of giants and such), it’s quite possible that those people don’t believe that a file should cost money. I’ve made a few things as close to “completely by myself” as possible and given them away for free, and those were physical objects - I lose it when I give it away! I have absolutely no problem giving away 1s and 0s for free, I can make as many copies of the original as I want with no additional effort.
Of course we don’t live in a world where everyone can follow their passions without needing money in return for sharing the result with the world, so it’s fully understandable people want to sell their art. It’s disingenuous and reductive to assume that anyone who doesn’t want to pay for art has never made anything completely by themselves, though.
Same for me, same font, same logic. The author put a lot of hands-on work into making something I stare at all day long. I even just bought a license for a friend for his birthday because I love it.
But I'm not sharing my copy with anyone else. This isn't insulin or something. They'll be just fine without it.
I've made a couple of fonts. Very bad ones. I know firsthand they absolutely take creativity and tradecraft.
A well made font, from an artistic perspective, is a thing of beauty-- particularly when it incorporates subtle visual themes and nuances. It's definitely more than just "drawing the alphabet". There are also metric ass-tons of glyphs necessary to make a usable font.
Likewise, a properly hinted digital font file, especially with little touches like ligatures, is also a thing of utilitarian beauty. It's a ton of work to get that right.
That the shapes of fonts can't be protected by copyright isn't a new idea. Anybody who makes a font today should know that going in. I wouldn't make a font with the expectation of getting paid outside of doing it for a specific commission. Doing it "for the love" and expecting to get paid seems like a losing business proposition.
>What saddens me is that a lot of people are so ignorant that they don't even realize a font is something that takes creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort to design.
Except most of the creative part was done 100 years ago and companies are now trying to protect the fact that they digitized something that has existed for a century or longer.
It's not about ignorance. There are so many things you interact with every day that take "creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort" that it's impossible to be aware of the details of each one. At some point you just have to abstract that stuff away and go on with your day.
No kidding. As part of a mapping project I worked on, I created a set of 200+ custom SVG icons. I used Inkscape and hand-drew most of the shapes or modified existing glyphs from icon fonts or other raw vector graphic sources. This took months of work and planning, and I even figured out how to use Inkscape’s batch scripting API to automate some things. It was one of the most tedious things I’ve worked on and I am very proud of it. And as far as I know, it’s still in use today by the customer.
I think it is perhaps important to realise that while what you say is true, that is not what is protected by copyright. As others have said in these comments, if the font had been copied using the digital data then it may be a copyright infringement, but if the duplicate font had been constructed from scratch to be a visually identical font then it may not be a copyright infringement.
>> What saddens me is that a lot of people are so ignorant that they don't even realize a font is something that takes creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort to design.
I get that an average computer user who just views content might not. But as soon as you start creating stuff and even searching for and downloading a font you like I'd think some kind of mental bell would ring like "oh, these are a thing. Like some type of commodity."
The problem is that there are so many free fonts that most people take them for granted. And honestly, I don't blame most folks for thinking that way because there isn't a good reason for the average person to pay for a font. If you're just making wedding invites or signage for an event or some other one-off thing, you probably don't care.
If you're a professional using them in your work, that's an entirely different story, and you are significantly more likely to appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into making them.
TIL: font designs are not copyrightable in the USA. Font files are but the design itself is not. It seems you are free to copy the design, but not the file. Not sure how that plays out in practice. Is it common to copy a font design or is it just more common to be inspired by a font design but make a new font that's in the same general design space? Like say Arial seems inspired by Helvetica but is not the same.
Looking forward to someone doing the same for Gill Sans and most of the Monotype catalog now that they've switched to annual licensing for webfonts (pay once use forever is gone)
It’s clearly not the same font (you can see visible differences between the letters), and therefore not pirated. The appearance of a typeface can’t be copyrighted in the US - only the digital instructions used to render them (e.g. if someone visually inspects a font and clones it that is perfectly alright, as long as they don’t directly copy from and adapt the underlying font file).
I spent some time last weekend playing with LLMs and SVGs- it turns out SVG is a domain specific language and LLMs know how to use it. I was able to get an LLM (grok from X.ai) to author SVGs from a description of what I wanted it to look like, and to modify existing SVG text to customize files that weren’t perfectly to my liking.
Fonts are also written in domain specific languages, I need to experiment with whether LLMs can author or modify fonts.
I do not think that the ridiculous terms that font and clip art and stock photo companies now offer, is going to be a viable business model in a couple of years.
We will all be able to use (for example) “LLM Helvetica Free” without any license.
You inspired me to attempt this and sadly GPT, Claude, and Gemini all said they didn’t have the software tools to do it. But as you mentioned, it can generate SVGs and those can be used to create a font.
Very early in my design education (late 90's) I was taught that fonts are fonts and the more you have, the better you tool set would be. As a graphic designer I definitely made things with fonts I had downloaded. It wasn't till I got my first serious design job at an agency where I quickly learned about purchasing and licensing fonts. Even if I could "find" a missing font, I wasn't allowed to use it. We needed to get the fonts directly from the vendor we were working with and if they were being too slow, we ate the cost and purchased the font.
It's even harder to get away with pirating fonts now with web fonts. Either the service can detect you pulling a font for a domain that isn't paying for it or webcrawlers will find unpaid fonts.
>> Either the service can detect you pulling a font for a domain that isn't paying for it...
Is that really a thing? Markup in a web page tells how to display the text. Saying "use this font over here on this other server" seems fair game on some level. Might not be on another level, but it's technically the end user downloading a file that's publicly available on some server.
In the USA at least, contributory and vicarious infringement are a thing. Grokster knowingly directed their users to infringing material so they picked up secondary liability.
AIUI the font vendor has a list of customers, each of whom are required to provide an exact list of the domains they will host it on and the domains they will display it on. So the crawlers, upon identifying a matching font, simply have to check that both the displaying and hosting domains match.
"Pulling a font for a domain"—wtf, isn't the client making the request? Why detect anything, just require a referrer on your allow-list, and deny if it's not there.
The moral background for copyright is in free fall these days.
It is quickly turning into one of these things that there are laws for, and everyone thinks it is rediculous, it is never enforced and DE facto not a law.
Copyright, and patents, are not based on moral principles. It's a temporary government license meant to encourage innovation and hustle. Whether it works or not, I don't know. But the only question of morality is if it's immoral to break an arbitrary law, or not.
The point I was addressing was whether or not copyright is grounded in moral rights, and as my earlier response notes, it depends on jurisdiction and foundations.
That said, I've come to a general view that moralising of pathologies or other behaviours is often highly counterproductive. Medicine progressed little when illness, disease, or dysfunction were rationalised as will of gods or divine retribution. Germ theory and other causal etiologies broke that dam. Left-handedness was widely viewed as literally malevolent, a sign of the devil. Which did little to prevent the condition, and greatly hampered opportunities and life-paths of the roughly 10% of the population which is left handed. Oppression of LGBTQIX+ individuals is often presented as a similar situation. Mental health and illness still carry strong moralising-of-pathology overtones, though the situation's improving. Justice and penal systems are presented by some as another such case (see in particular Robert Sapolsky).
Back to copyright and patent: both foundations, authorial/inventor support and moral rights strike me as grossly flawed in both grounding and consequence.
Copyright has always been based on moral principles. 'Moral rights' have been part of copyright longer than "encourage innovation and hustle" has been something the government has considered worth promoting. The original copyright laws were about controlling who could print the bible, and the statute of anne was about encouraging learning while controlling what booksellers could and couldn't do. Copyright if anything was about preventing innovation from the very beginning, and slowing the hustle of culture down so that incumbents could edge out newcomers - a drama that has played out generation after generation
All abstract property rights are legal fiction. The notion that you can own, say, a piece of land that you have never even came close to, simply by virtue of a record in some registry somewhere; and, based on that ownership, then restrict the ability of others who actually do live next to it to enter it or otherwise use it, is rather absurd from a "natural right" perspective.
I should note that this isn't even some kind of hot new take. Here's what Thomas Jefferson had to say on the subject:
"It is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all... It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society."
"A right of property in moveable things is admitted before the establishment of government. A separate property in lands, not till after that establishment. The right to moveables is acknowledged by all the hordes of Indians surrounding us. Yet by no one of them has a separate property in lands been yielded to individuals. He who plants a field keeps possession till he has gathered the produce, after which one has as good a right as another to occupy it. Government must be established and laws provided, before lands can be separately appropriated, and their owner protected in his possession. Till then, the property is in the body of the nation, and they, or their chief as trustee, must grant them to individuals, and determine the conditions of the grant."
Just because it’s a fiction doesn’t meant it’s not effective in triggering human responses and proactive actions. In a broad sense, fiction is all we get as human minds, whether it’s representative representation of our actual embedding universe or not.
It's worth noting that the moral background (at least in terms of political philosophy in the US) was always rooted in practicalities. The Constitution even includes the qualifier "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." The moment a protection works against those goals, it's on shaky ground. And that ground is always in flux; there's a reason Thomas Jefferson noted regarding patents that "other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrasment than advantage to society."
This is why copyright is shot-through with exceptions (for example, we give broad leeway to infringement for educational purposes, for what benefit does society gain if protection of the intellectual property of this generation stunts the growth of creative faculties of the next?). And that's usually fine, until, say, a broadly-exceptioned process to gather and catalog art and expression worldwide available online that was fed into neural net training in academic settings for decades becomes something of a different moral quality when the only thing that's changed is instead of a grey-bearded professor overseeing the machine it's a grey-templed billionaire financier.
(I submit to the Grand Council of People Reading This Thread the possibility that one resolution to this apparent paradox is to consider that the actual moral stance is "It's not fair that someone might starve after working hard on a product of the mind while others benefit from their hard work," and that perhaps copyright is simply not the best tool to address that moral concern).
I don't have objections to the tool. My issues are with how much power we have assigned to that tool.
The right to claim renumeration for, and restrict use of, one's work should not IMO extend for multiple generations. I'm not sure it should even extend for one.
What happens if you present an image of a page in some font to an LLM, and ask it to make you a font file for that font? An LLM could probably not only do that, but create matching characters for ones not already present.
- Font programmes are. (Generally 1980 Computer Software Copyright Act.)
- Cleanroom reimplementation of software is not copyright infringement. An AI without access to original source code would likely pass this test.
- As a further twist, it appears likely that courts will hold that AI creations are themselves not copyrightable (original works of authorship), such that the product of any such project would itself be public domain. (See: <https://www.reuters.com/legal/ai-generated-art-cannot-receiv...>.)
The whole scenario appears to open the door to liberation of all fonts for which public letterforms are available. This would be an "AI hole" (analogous to the ... analogue hole) for escaping copyright. Whether this liberation would occur before foundries passed new protective legislation will be an interesting question.
A good question to work on is whether an LLM, given a reasonable number of characters of a font, can generate letter forms for the entire Unicode character space. Probably. It's a style matching problem, and LLMs are good at that.
That would be interesting to see. An a possible way of extending current typefaces through the Unicode glyph-space.
Thought I'd had earlier: there's a lot of detail that goes into font design, particularly anticipating issues with specific media.
E.g., faces meant for wet-ink print often incorporates features to avoid pooling or smearing ink ("ink traps", see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ink_trap>). Electrostatic printing (a/k/a laserprinters), and screen-based displays (CRT, LED, Plasma, eInk) also have idiosyncrasies which fine-detail font design may take into account.
I'm not sure those would be hugely significant, but seem a domain in which a naive AI font designer might prove deficient.
This comment section is precisely what I expected upon discovering this very funny anecdote regarding the irony and hypocrisy involved with the infamous anti-piracy advocacy of the late '90's/early '00s. Peak HN--didactic, humorless, and lost in its own takes about the absolute least relevant detail of the story: font licensing.
This sounds very critical, but I assure you, these are my people. I rather find it very reassuring, even a little charming.
I'm also enjoying the conversation, but IMO font licensing is core to whether or not there is actual irony and hypocrisy at play (specifically the copyright aspect, and whether or not the font clone actually infringed copyright).
Iceshrimp, or at least this JavaScript version of it, is a fork of Misskey, which has been mentioned on HN a few times. If you've heard of Mastodon, Misskey and its forks participate in the same decentralized social network - Mastodon users can like and comment on the tweet-like posts that a Misskey user makes and vice-versa.
The Iceshrimp devs are also working on a "port" to .NET that's basically a brand new social media app, but with an upgrade path from the JavaScript version.
I also use Iceshrimp to self-host my own fediverse account and I think it's pretty good software. I think it has a better UI that Mastodon and it has some cutesy features that Mastodon lacks, like being able to emoji-react to posts.
Having worked in the graphic design industry during the 90's, no. There's no way I'd have just slipped a font I didn't own on a disk and sent it off to a printer. When it comes to fonts for coding... sure there was that ONE time I snagged Operator Mono for an extended "trial". I still believe in paying for things that I use on a daily basis, so I switched back to Sauce Code Pro or something.
PDF is a famously (and hilariously) wild document format because it satisfied the need of being able to recreate a work piece faithfully using thousands of kinds of outputs, some of which didn't even exist when the document was created, to ideally arbitrary pixel resolution (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbCniw-BcW0 for a delightful and informative talk including this topic).
As a result, in one of the modes of PDF you can save the entire font file for every font used by the PDF into the PDF itself, just in case it's not present on the recipient's machine. Costly? Sure! But what else are you going to do if your document uses a super-special font for displaying mathematical symbols or sanskrit or the glyphs of a language understood by fifty people on the planet and Unicode isn't widely adopted yet, having been invented just two years before PDF?
So in this case, the author grabbed a copy of a PDF version of the ad (because those ads are still available online), cracked open the document itself, and found the glyphs for the letters are sourced from a version of the font that was intentionally created to steal someone else's font work because the whole font file is in the document.
>Sure! But what else are you going to do if your document uses a super-special font for displaying mathematical symbols or sanskrit or the glyphs of a language understood by fifty people on the planet and Unicode isn't widely adopted yet, having been invented just two years before PDF?
Assuming it's for print/display and not future editing, I imagine you could convert the font strokes to vectors or similar.
You could. But in a thousand page document, that's a lot of memory used up to record a vector for every letter 'c'. So of course you do two layers: record modifiers and transforms on a canonical 'c', and then keep a canonical 'c' somewhere with all the other letters.
... But you already have that data structure: it's the font file itself.
(Possibly worth noting here also is that historically, Adobe owned both the PDF format and the file format for most popular fonts. So they were heavily incentivized to just reuse code they already owned here instead of reinventing a wheel).
Typefaces are not copyrightable but fonts are off, using a font with a knockoff typeface is not copyright infringement because it is not using the copyrighted font.
The concept of "piracy" and copyright is completely ridiculous.
Real piracy involves stealing, destroying and killing, not copying numbers.
I never entered in a contract with you, producer of goods or innovation, you have no right to forbid me from copying anything.
You may prevent your own customers from facilitating access of non paying customers to their goods (by making them sign a contract) and even persecute them in a civil court (for breach of contract).
The fact that governments allow copyright owners to censor information on the internet to protect their commercial interest is just absolutely insane and incredibly damaging to the freedom of circulation of culture and ideas.
Also be aware that some people actually consider the real PSA to be a Mandela effect since they consider "You wouldn't download a car" to be the "real, original" text of these PSAs, while in reality this was a popular parody/meme that was made out of the PSA:
I am not registered with this private instance, but there is a comment that I want to reply to:
> This is so typical of people who are just doing a hatchet job for money but have no personal interest in the topic or skin in the game.
This is both true and incomplete. Advocates against piracy are time and again caught infringing on IP. I think about when Lily Allen stole the content of her anti-piracy screed "It's Not Alright" from Techdirt[0]:
> However, [...] the rest of the blog post – put there by Lilly herself – is someone else’s work. Arrr mateys, Long John Allen lifted the entire post from another site – Techdirt.com – effectively pirating the work of the one and only Mike Masnick.
> “I think it’s wonderful that Lilly Allen found so much value in our Techdirt post that she decided to copy — or should I say ‘pirate’? — the entire post,” Mike told TorrentFreak on hearing the shocking news.
The anti-piracy creators demand that we stay within their narrow definition of "piracy", which just so happens to exclude the work that they steal. Yes, the creative agency behind the "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" ad are disconnected from the cause. And their clients at the MPAA and FACT do not consider fonts to be worthy of the protections that are ostensibly the basis of their existence.
But you can copyright a font name, so if someone copies your work and releases it under a new name... that's that's like creating a copy of the car piece by piece and giving it your own name.
So they were right: we not downloading a car, we never were. We were all just making copies.
I don’t think that’s productive. Best case response that I can imagine is piracy opponents pushing for some legislation mandating fonts with DRM.
Air quotes - “it’s obviously the fault of the person who cloned the font and the general public needs to be protected against such content” - end air quotes.
At the same time, it doesn’t have to be productive, it’s funny enough.
Is this the wrong time to rant about font licensing though? I’ve always bought and paid for fonts, but as I’ve gradually transitioned to mobile app development, I one day realized that all the fonts I bought for print are now worthless to me.
These crazy outdated licenses that let you print as many magazines or books you want forever, for a one-time price. But if your hobby is making apps, then suddenly the same font will cost you 50 times more - for a single year.
I guess these font sellers imagine there’s still some app boom - a Klondike rush with developers bathing in dollars. Maybe if their licenses were more realistic, piracy would be less of a problem.
There is maybe nothing in the entire world that I am less sympathetic towards than the cause of font piracy / font liberation. You have perfectly good --- in fact, historically excellent --- fonts loaded by default for free on any computer you buy today. Arguing for the oppression of font licenses is, to me, like arguing about how much it costs to buy something at Hermès. Just don't shop at Hermès.
Part of the problem is that Monotype has a bit of a monopoly in the upper segment of the market though right? I know they're not the only players, but it feels like they've vacuumed up enough small, successful foundries that they now control enough of the market that they can get away with the kind of aggressive behavior that wouldn't be tenable in a healthier, more competitive marketplace.
From Wikipedia [0]
> Via acquisitions including Linotype GmbH, International Typeface Corporation, Bitstream, FontShop, URW, Hoefler & Co., Fontsmith, Fontworks [ja] and Colophon Foundry, the company has gained the rights to major font families including Helvetica, ITC Franklin Gothic, Optima, ITC Avant Garde, Palatino, FF DIN and Gotham. It also owns MyFonts, used by many independent font design studios.[3] The company is owned by HGGC, a private equity firm.
For those less familiar with them, those are BIG names, and the acquisition of them could perhaps aptly be compared, for instance, to Disney's acquisitions of properties like Lucasfilm and Marvel.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotype_Imaging
Serious question: who cares? There is no scarcity of high quality fonts (there are more of them available to ordinary people today than at any point in history). So they control Hoefler. If that's a problem for you, don't use Hoefler faces.
Independent foundries want to sell typefaces with reasonable royalty shares. Customers want trusted marketplaces (i.e. ones where scammers aren't reselling fonts they've pirated) where they can purchase high quality fonts with reasonable licensing for reasonable prices. Both customers and foundries are poorly served by Monotype monopolizing the big font marketplaces.
The Monotype monopoly is a legitimate problem that people have legitimate complaints about.
You're saying, exclusively, that Monotype is app-storing the market for fonts by buying up the common tooling designers use to transact in fonts, right? You don't care what Monotype charges for its own fonts?
(That seems like a perfectly reasonable complaint).
I agree the average person is likely fine with the fonts on their computer, but this is profoundly misunderstanding the importance of design. Typefaces are incredibly important, and have been for centuries.
I'd argue that complaining about font prices is less like a Hermes bag, and more like complaining about high-end ingredients when a supermarket has cheap stuff. Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer.
Even under this analogy you're complaining about the price of luxury goods and saying that it's no wonder people shoplift to steal the truffles because they're so darn expensive.
If you can't afford the license for the font, your app is small-time enough that you can make do with one of the many, many high-quality fonts that are available for free, there's no need to pirate it. If your app is big enough that the difference matters, then you can likely afford the sticker price.
No, I'm saying a Michelin chef can complain about a 50x increase in the cost of truffles without negating the fact that a lot of people happily survive on ramen.
op isn't saying you shouldn't complain. op is saying you shouldn't steal instead of complaining
I think there's some confusion in who is responding to whom, then. I never said anything about piracy, but the person responding to me may have confused me with the top-level comment.
All I have done is defend the importance of typography, and never mentioned piracy or stealing.
Typography is important. So important that we have really good looking fonts available for free. And a custom font isn’t going to be the deciding factor in whether your next AI powered social graph app sinks or floats. Guaranteed.
Then why are the fonts so expensive?
Because designers fuss a lot about nearly undetectable differences in color, fonts, and many other things. Maybe they make a difference in the aggregate. But if you can’t identify the difference between Ariak and Helvetica (to pick a particularly glaring example) you’re probably not one of those designers.
I agree. Many people can hardly tell the difference between Arial and Helvetica. There used to be a website where you could test how good you are at telling them apart.
You won't notice many small differences between certain fonts. But that doesn't mean they're unnecessary. As you said, they make a difference when taken together. For screens, there are a number of adjustments and techniques that improve screen readability. Hinting, separate designs, contrast for low dpi and subpixel rendering compatibility, for example. At least some of the optimizations don't work out of the box, but have to be adjusted by designers. That's why it can happen that a font you bought for print media now requires an extra license for websites and apps.
There are plenty of wonderfully readable fonts for the web and apps that are free and sufficient for most projects. If you want something special, I don't think it's wrong to pay for it. Personally, I would prefer more reasonable prices, though.
And there are also design fashions. I tend to dislike a lot of the current designs by seemingly 20 something’s with perfect vision that use rake-thin fonts in some grey tone.
USED to be a website? Aww, I did pretty well there - going to miss it.
No idea which one it was but I found this one and got a perfect score. The difference is pretty obvious... https://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/index.php
Same, 18/20 for me. The all caps on MATTEL got me, and the STAPLES one as well, for some reason.
But the differences on the lowercase "t" and "s", uppercase "g", the number 3, and both upper an lowercase "c", are obvious. Helvetica is much more refined.
There are good reasons why well designed typography is expensive. A lot of thought and effort went into designing every line and curve. Even if most people can't consciously appreciate these details, they experience it subconsciously by how the design makes them feel. This is why brand designers are well paid. Anyone can design a logo, but to make a design that transmits a specific feeling, that requires a lot of skill. And typography is a core component of this.
> Then why are the fonts so expensive?
Because they're considered important, and definitely take a long time to make. Try making one.
Not to mention that it's almost impossible to make a living designing fonts.
Maybe "this font is offensively priced to the point where I immediately think the person selling it is a criminal using this for money laundering, or clinically insane" and "it's hard to sell enough fonts to live off of" are related?
Maybe if charlatans didn't say with a straight face that a font should be sold on a subscription model they'd sell more? Maybe if it didn't cost as much as a car they'd sell more?
Market segmentation
No, those things aren't comparable. Truffles have a functional role in a dish. A typeface does not have a meaningful functional role in a document, compared to the high-quality freely-available alternatives. This is like complaining about some kind of specially-carved or dyed truffle.
I respect you a ton (genuinely, I think you're the most interesting writer in the tech space), but you have a profound misunderstanding of the importance of typography if you think the only reason you'd need a paid typeface is the same reason you'd need a Hermes bag. I know you're a curious person, so hopefully you take this as an opportunity to open your horizons on the importance of it.
I'm a typeface nerd. Bringhurst is one of 3 books on the end-table next to me right now. I spend a stupid amount of money for Hoefler fonts for my dumb blog.
This to me is like the Menswear Guy on Twitter, who will explain in very great detail to you why the Hermès product is significantly better than the generic alternative. He's right, but he also understands that you buy the Hermès product to make a statement. Spend money on that statement if you want --- I do --- but don't try to pretend you have a right to it.
(i don't mean i own any hermes products; just stupidly expensive typefaces)
I usually like your takes, but where I disagree today is when you say: "Truffles have a functional role in a dish." but fonts don't.
Either both do have functional roles or both are luxuries like Hermès.
I don't want to get too deep into this because it doesn't matter to my point (you're also not entitled to eat truffled dishes any more than you're entitled to eat ortolans). But: set a document in one text face or another; it won't much matter at all to the experience of reading it (unless you pick a bad text face). Leave the truffle out of a risotto and you've made a different dish.
The important subtext of this thread is that, when we're talking about functional typesetting, the solutions space is pretty constrained. There aren't that many things you can do with a text face (vs. a display face). And you already have available to you extremely high-quality, well-hinted text faces at a full range of weights.
While we're on this subject, which extremely high-quality, well-hinted text faces that are freely available would you personally recommend to web and app designers?
Take any famous wordmark and replace it with a different typeface. You have a different wordmark. Typefaces aren't only used in body text. If you've read Bringhurst and are a typeface nerd, you should know you're arguing in bad faith. (Also generally like your comments, fyi, but you should know not to chime in that way about that topic on HN where the average attitude to anything design related is a mix of contempt and ignorance).
There are plenty of wordmarks that use no pre-designed typeface at all (NASA, Disney, Coca Cola); you're clearly not entitled to the vectors of those marks so you can repurpose them in your own work. Not to mention that most of the greatest wordmarks of all time were designed without any access to per-impression-licensed commercial fonts!
(I do not think it is the case that HN shuns design and I do not think you will be able to support with evience a claim that I'm ignorant of type design or commenting in bad faith).
Correct. And those are the wordmarks I'm not talking about. Let me try it differently: Would you say typeface choice plays no functional role in the branding of companies that do rely on pre-designed typefaces? Vignelli's work would look the same with different fonts? No, you know that's just absurd. Or are we just equivocating on "functional" here? If we're talking about letter forms, certainly looking a certain way is part of their function? And I know you know more than the average guy about type design, which is precisely why I'm confused as to why you would go for that seemingly meta-contrarian take.
It's not a contrarian take. The argument I'm making is simple. If you're doing functional type design, such as setting a book or a magazine article or a user interface, you have a wealth of viable faces available that do not involve per-impression licensing; many are free, some even came installed with your computer. If you're doing logo design, everything is out the window anyways: a wordmark is an aesthetic statement. If you're a designer, and you're designing a mark, and your best idea requires you to license a Monotype font with per-impression licensing, and you don't want to do that, just use your next best idea. That design challenge is really not much different than having your best idea depend on access to NYT Cheltenham, which you can't use at any price. Or, for that matter, the vectors of the FedEx logo.
I'm not blowing you off. I'm taking your argument seriously. It just doesn't hold.
> If you're doing functional type design, such as setting a book or a magazine article or a user interface, you have a wealth of viable faces available that do not involve per-impression licensing; many are free, some even came installed with your computer.
This is well put and thanks for engaging with the argument in good spirits.
I imagine that fonts often matter a lot for brand identity and specific use cases (like programming) will also have specific aspects of importance (like ligatures in particular to a lot of folks and being able to tell symbols apart at a glance so IloO0 etc. don’t present issues, but for many use cases some utilitarian “good enough” choice will suffice, because there are a lot of competently made free fonts out there.
His argument is about body typefaces, not wordmarks at all, so yes this is talking past based on a different definition of "functional".
Then we aren't disagreeing. I never said anything about stealing or piracy; I agree with you that not being able to afford something doesn't give you the right to take it.
I think we're responding to different things. You're upset the original person mentioned piracy, whereas I took their rant to be more about licensing changes being yet another way companies are creeping up prices from one-time-purchase to rent-forever. You used to be able to pay for a font and use it in a magazine, but now you have to pay per impression.
And moreso, I'm annoyed by most of the comments saying that the free fonts on your computer should be enough.
No, we disagree. I think those companies should creep up their prices. There aren't enough type designers employed in the world. The social cost to cumbersome font licensing is essentially zero; in fact, for the reason I gave just one sentence ago, it probably tilts the other direction.
Further: the free fonts on your computer are enough. You can do the full range of type design with what ships on Win10 or macOS, and you can do it strikingly. I cringe at my dumb blog typefaces today, because I could get an equally striking effect with the standard web font stack; most of the work is in setting the text, not in picking a particularly mannered typeface.
Okay, we disagree then! I hope you take the time to reflect on how weird and aggressive you've made this whole conversation, but it seems this is where we part ways.
I may just be more comfortable disagreeing than you are! It's certainly not personal.
Typefaces do have functional roles, they {exude} a point in culture and time (the fonts that HN supports certainly time-stamps it).
edit: HN won't allow Fraktur[1] characters, even though they are in the unicode standard. Yet more evidence that font matters for the tone of the message you deliver.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktur
> A typeface does not have a meaningful functional role in a document
100% incorrect. There are fonts that are made specifically to increase legibility for a dyslexic audience. If that's not a functional role than I don't know what is.
One dyslexia font was tested and found to have the same legibility as normal fonts:
"Dyslexie font neither benefits nor impedes the reading process of children with and without dyslexia."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11881-017-0154-6
I'm skeptical that any of these fonts actually make a difference. (Although if you like Comic Sans, you might as well continue using it; it doesn't do any harm.)
Oh for God's sake. You also can't set an instruction manual entirely in DIN Grindel Milk. The implied subtext was the functional equivalence of free and unfree display fonts. The most popular dyslexia font in the world is free.
Ah that's my bad, I read the first statement without seeing that you prefaced it with "as compared to free alternatives".
Sorry for coming at you that hard, it just felt like a gotcha. But we both misread each other!
The truffle, and the font, add _essence_
> Truffles have a functional role in a dish
Cheap "truffle oil" can fill that role as much as a free font can fill the role of a premium one. The real truffle and the premium font have a functional role for the few people who can tell either apart. For the rest maybe anything works, just put something on the plate or screen.
Not without adding fat
A high price in a font won't sink a business as a high price in truffle would for a Michelin chef... The price of a font for a business is extremely negligible... Or again you shouldn't buy it if your business is too small. And if it's that small you should be able to justify the value added by buying that font as truffle does for the chef.
So we are back at what OP said.
Well the analogy falls apart because (among many, many other reasons) the people eating at Michelin rated restaurants, especially 3-star, are completely insensitive to the price. It will cost whatever it costs and there will still be a long wait to get a table, if you even can.
So rather than pretending we're talking about truffles, let's just talk about fonts directly without strained analogies. Fonts, which the majority of people don't even recognize. 90% of people don't even know what a foundry is. Your average person can't tell the difference between any two fonts if they're both sans-serif or serif.
It doesn't fall apart, you have examples that actually match it. Marketing boutiques of website creators match the 3-star Michelin analogy. High budgets from their customers (think LVMH) are the norm. And they will love and understand paying X for a font. In fact they will almost expect this type of thing in the design process.
At the end of the day if people don't see the difference and the value between a free and a priced one, then they don't need to steal and can just use the free ones. There are plenty of amazing free fonts anyway some being the actual roots of many paying ones, and the gold standards.
Maybe it won't sink the business, but prices were bad enough for IBM to cough up the money to grow their own truffles (of IBM Plex variety).
Where’s the car in this analogy?
How would you get away with the stolen truffles?
Try this analogy out: it's no wonder that people are interested in / have demand for generic reproductions of licensed cultivars of a plant (e.g. buying generic "grape tomatoes" rather than specific, expensive "cherry tomatoes.")
It's also no wonder that people will happily buy these generics even when they're not white-box reverse-engineered phenotype reproductions via independent breeding, but carefully bred-true genetic descendants of the proprietary original cultivar (a.k.a. "seed piracy" — the thing Monsanto goes to extreme lengths to stop people from doing with their GMO wheat.)
I don’t particularly like the analogy, but love cherry tomatoes. Grape tomatoes are such a blight on this world. Kind of like Arial is to Helvetica.
I would never steal a cherry tomato, but will reject a grape tomato at any chance I get.
I can't figure out how to download your comment. (Written in a serif font textarea which will show up as a generic arial)
There are roughly zero apps out there that would ”deeply suffer” from having to use freely available and/or system supported fonts.
That's not true at all. You think games would feel as immersive if everything was Calibri? Magazine-style articles would feel as tactile if they all used the same system fonts? Etc.
You may not care about fonts, but to say they don't matter is a misunderstanding. For example, I could glibly say we only need one programming language (the user doesn't care what syntax you used before it was compiled down to 1s and 0s!), but any engineer would make the case why that's not true at all.
How is using some of the thousands of freely available fonts out there even remotely the same as using Calibri for everything?
You're making absurd comparisons and not being sincere.
No, I think we're just looking at it from different perspectives.
Yes, most people are fine choosing from the fonts available on their computer when writing a document.
But that's not what me nor OP are talking about. We're talking about shipping software (like a mobile app), or publishing a blog post. In that case, the best you can specify is either a very common font (Helvetica, etc), or a high-level classification (serif, sans-serif, etc).
There are many free fonts out there, yes, but there's a reason they're free. The quality for a majority of them is significantly lower, and many designs come with constraints (either utilitarian or stylistic). You don't have to agree, but I'm not being absurd or lacking sincerity.
You're also just going around and commenting the same thing on each of my posts. But don't limit your understand to just my writing here; there's thousands of books about the importance of typography if you're curious to learn more.
> There are many free fonts out there, yes, but there's a reason they're free.
Go on and tell me what that reason is then. Are you also going to tell me free open-source software, like Linux is low-quality because its free?
> The quality for a majority of them is significantly lower
Again, a completely baseless, unprovable assertion.
> You don't have to agree, but I'm not being absurd or lacking sincerity.
What do you call your example of using Calibri for everything in response to someone suggesting the use of free fonts?
You are lacking sincerity and making absurd claims. Almost everything else you say is literally baseless rhetoric that you are unable to back up with data or any objective argument.
> there's thousands of books about the importance of typography if you're curious to learn more.
It's amazing that you apparently know of thousands of such books, but are unable to make one coherent, objective argument to back up your claims.... did you read them?
You’ve been combative throughout this thread, and it's clear that you don’t see typography or design as disciplines that warrant serious thought. I don't think you're actually willing to engage with an explanation of why it matters but I'll try anyway.
System fonts are the absolute bottom of the barrel. Some are well designed but using any of them is a visual shorthand that you didn't care enough to put thought into your design. You're associating your product with the ocean of amateur work on the internet, giving the impression you copy pasted a template.
There are some high quality free fonts typically backed by massive organizations with actual typographic expertise. Most free fonts however, are amateur work that are technically and functionally lacking. Professional fonts are well designed at all weights, they're carefully spaced, they include much larger character sets to support more languages, contain features like lining and non-lining figures, variable font weights, small caps... are those all slight differences?
There’s a reason so many articles exist with titles like “Google Fonts That Don’t Suck”. Most of them do. If you are a professional whose job requires working with type, then choosing a font is foundational to your product. Arguing that all design is BS is just lazy; it's not a coherent argument.
I highly recommend practicaltypography.com, a free web book that discusses all of this and more, including why system fonts are bad and why a professional typeface is worth paying for.
This claim that system fonts are the "bottom of the barrel" is just so clearly false that I don't understand how you can be an advocate of typography and say it. Both Microsoft and Apple put huge amounts of effort into typography, contract or employ well-regarded designers, and their outputs are themselves well-regarded.
If you wanted to say "most of what's on Google Fonts is bottom of the barrel", you'd have a colorable argument. But that isn't what you said.
San Francisco is a great font. Arial is a perfectly functional semi-clone of Helvetica, Times New Roman is a decent interpretation of Plantin. Roboto is an interesting mash-up of Helvetica, DIN, and a few others.
System font from a web standpoint means you get one of these depending on the user's choice of phone, desktop, and/or browser.
It is somewhat like buying art because the frame covers a blemish on the wall. That the print inside the frame might be of a famous impressionist painting does not mean that the frame or the print necessarily go with the room.
The car analogy involves a car rental place - that they may give you any one of several newish, functional and even stylish vehicles does not change that you may often wind up being paired with a vehicle mismatched for your function.
Around the time Matthew Carter was creating Georgia, one of the most widely-used system fonts in the world, for Microsoft, he was also widely considered one of the best typographers in the world. Georgia is not hotel room wall art.
There are many laughably horrible attempts at fonts out there on free font sites (I remember my days learning to write software in the early 00s), sure. But there are also high quality professionally designed and typeset fonts available for free, including those of the system variety. The argument is comparing the latter to expensive designer fonts, not the former to high quality fonts.
> You’ve been combative throughout this thread
Disagreeing with you doesn't mean I'm combative. (Not that I care)
> typography or design as disciplines that warrant serious thought.
We are talking about fonts here, more specifically fonts used in software, more specifically the quality of free fonts used in software. Not 'design' as a whole which is much more than that.
> System fonts are the absolute bottom of the barrel.
If you say so.
> You're associating your product with the ocean of amateur work on the internet, giving the impression you copy pasted a template.
Reusing a font means you're copy-pasting your article/app/etc from a template? Erm ok.
> There are some high quality free fonts typically backed by massive organizations with actual typographic expertise.
'Some'? Like 1000? 10000? How many fonts does one application need? 'typically'? How 'typically'? And I'm not being pedantic - your statements are pretty meaningless without actual numbers.
> Professional fonts are well designed at all weights, they're carefully spaced, they include much larger character sets to support more languages, contain features like lining and non-lining figures, variable font weights, small caps... are those all slight differences?
What is a 'Professional font'? lmao
Plenty of free fonts have all of the features you've listed, and plenty of non-free fonts don't.
> There’s a reason so many articles exist with titles like “Google Fonts That Don’t Suck”. Most of them do.
Again 'so many' and 'most'... you should provide specific (at least approximate) numbers, otherwise this says nothing about how many good free fonts are actually out there.
> Arguing that all design is BS is just lazy
Well I didn't say that, pretending that I did is pretty lazy tho.
> I highly recommend practicaltypography.com, a free web book that discusses all of this and more, including why system fonts are bad and why a professional typeface is worth paying for.
Oh geez! A FREE book which tells you why you should pay for 'professional' fonts while at the same time selling them to you with affiliate links! Thank you sir!
You should care if you're being combatative, but, even more importantly, quoting previous comments the way you're doing doesn't work well on HN and is also a flamewar trope. Everybody can read the comments you're responding to. Just refer back to them in prose. A single quote, maybe 2 in a long comment, fine, but what you're doing now creates the impression that you're sort of rebutting what the previous commenter said as you read them, sentence by sentence, which is a tell that you're not actually thinking about what they said.
Also: they're pretty clearly wrong, so you shouldn't need any of this to refute them.
I am rebutting what the previous commenter said, sentence by sentence (almost), I don't know why that tells you that I'm not actually thinking about what they said though. Did I misunderstand or misrepresent something they said?
Because it’s easy to respond to one-off sentences. It’s harder to respond to the substantial argument they make.
Going against someone is not the same as rebutting, the quality of the argument counts.
I'm not going to argue with you, but I just want to point out that the person I was responding to specifically used the phrase "system supported fonts". That's why I mentioned Calibri.
No, what the person you responded to said was:
> '..freely available and/or system supported fonts.'
Not just 'system supported fonts' (whatever that means), and not just Calibri. That's why your 'use Calibri for everything' example is absurd and does not at all address the point they made.
The last sentence is the variety that is super tempting to make but counterproductive because it shuts down discussion or poisons it thereafter its made to impress bystanders not actually communicate with the person.
Agree that it might not be the best, but seems like a fairly appropriate response for someone trying to back up their rhetoric with 'thousands of books out there'. How is it 'made to impress bystanders'?
Who cares? They're part of a line of argumentation that dunks on the typography work of Matthew Carter. This is very much the same thing as a thread on industrial design dunking on Dieter Rams. You don't get angry at that kind of argument; you laugh at it.
Oh I was never angry, I was enjoying the argument (maybe that makes me combative, oh well), and I was completely open to being proven wrong and thereby becoming more informed on the topic... alas...
Something tells me that some designers care about fonts a heck of a lot more than most consumers do. As a consumer, I care about legibility above all else. There are plenty of metrics that affect that, but many of the freely available (albeit, not necessarily free) fonts are perfectly fine on that front. More bluntly, some of those freely available fonts are going to be better than the vast majority of fonts that you can pay for because: (a) companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have invested in their development or licensing to ensure their customers have access to high quality fonts with coverage for most languages; and (b) they have wide availability, since font substitution is going to have a much larger impact upon the perceived quality of a document than its use of quality fonts.
Maybe this pedantic snobbery will matter again when we switch back to creative mode, but it all seems highly elitist right now while many are trying to just survive.
I admire your passion, but... as someone who is not deeply interested in fonts, I view them in largely functional terms. Can I read it? Does it look ok?
Programming language choice has an aesthetic side, but it is also very much a functional concern. Can I write secure code? Will it be performant? Will it be maintainable?
Different languages represent different functional tradeoffs. Are fonts really the same kind of thing? IOW, how would you make a choice between using Arial vs. Helvetica?
Arial v Helvetica is an interesting example, because Arial was designed basically as a cost-efficient alternative to Helvetica. So, the reason you'd choose between the two is exactly the thing the original comment was complaining about – licensing! They were designed to be metrically compatible... meaning, the character widths and spaces are exactly the same. This means that switching to Arial won't affect the layout of your document. This was more important when things were more analog, but it's still important with digital documents: for example, it could mess up the number of pages, which would affect meta content or create line breaks that seem meaningful but aren't. Additionally, having things like a widow (a word by itself on a new line) can disrupt the visual flow and draw focus to or away from content in ways you don't desire.
But just because those two typefaces are quite similar (and the reason to pick between them is largely financial/convenience) doesn't mean you'd never want to have more fine-grained control over the text you're working with.
You mentioned security. When I'm editing this comment, 0 and O are very different (the zero has a slash through it), however when I hit save they look quite similar. (But because we're all using system fonts on HN, it might be different for you). While it's often just a stylistic choice, in many situations the two characters would be indistinguishable and that would be an issue, which is why someone might choose a typeface where characters are significantly different. Think a password you have to transcribe.
If you know your font will be used in a quite small size, you may want one that is optimized for being read at tiny sizes. If you're displaying something technical, a monowidth font is better suited.
And all of this focused on utility for the most part; I'm leaving out all the reasons you'd want it for stylistic reasons. If you're trying to make people feel at ease, you may want typeface where the end of the strokes are rounded, for example. Sometimes you want people to feel a certain way, in the same way you modulate your tone when talking.
Yes. Arial is bad. But Microsoft shifted away from Arial more than 20 years ago.
>You think games would feel as immersive if everything was Calibri?
What computer are you buying that only has one font? There are dozens of fonts, covering all kinds of styles, on every desktop sold.
Very few system fonts are any good. Would you use Arial instead of Helvetica Neue? I certainly wouldn't. Put two posters side-by-side and you'd notice the Helvetica one as looking more professional, even without any design background.
Additionally, very few system fonts include all the weights. Fonts aren't just come in a single weight. The font you use for a giant page-filling title is generally skinnier than the font used for a caption.
Good design creates a reaction, such as causing you to buy something or interacting more with something or whatever, even for people that say they don't care about design.
Designers know you better than you know yourself.
> Very few system fonts are any good.
An obviously false statement which you can't possibly back up.
> Would you use Arial instead of Helvetica Neue? I certainly wouldn't. Put two posters side-by-side and you'd notice the Helvetica one as looking more professional, even without any design background.
First of all that's just completely your own subjective opinion. Second, there are many other free sans-serif fonts out there to choose from (examples[1]).
> Good design creates a reaction, such as causing you to buy something or interacting more with something or whatever
'Design' can encompass many things, but can you show me some data that backs up your claim that slight differences in fonts will make a difference in product quality/performance/revenue/etc? Because I have seen a loooot of data that says it's almost always completely irrelevant.
[1] https://fonts.google.com/?categoryFilters=Sans+Serif:%2FSans...
Apple has been shipping systems with various weights of Helvetica Neue forever. https://developer.apple.com/fonts/system-fonts/
This is just clearly wrong. Even Georgia and Verdana are very serious works of typography. The Cleartype fonts hold their own against modern text faces. San Francisco and New York are also obviously strong fonts. These are gigantic companies that take typography seriously, they can easily afford to invest in competent system fonts, and they both obviously have.
Yes: I think games would be approximately as immersive as they are now if everything was set in Calibri. Also: Calibri is a very, very good typeface.
Avatar was pretty immersive! And they just did Select-All and chose Papyrus!
They updated it for the sequel, and one example doesn't nullify thousands of years of design.
But to go down that path from a logical standpoint... Papyrus isn't on my computer (OSX) for whatever reason, and it doesn't come on Linux. Papyrus isn't a free, public font... it's licensed by its owner (ITC), so the only reason you can use it on your computer is because someone is paying a license for you to see it.
I don't have a strong opinion here. I was only making a silly reference to the SNL skit :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ
There are literally thousands of free font out there available for download.
>That's not true at all.
What specific iOS apps would suffer greatly by having to use the ~75 font families that come with the device? How would they suffer exactly?
https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/List_of_fonts_included_with...
Is your point weakened by the fact that there is not one freely available font to use commercially, but literally thousands?
I guess it comes down to how you view the concept of "the medium is the message". Should the tone be set by the creator of the software / writer of the blog post / etc, or should the end user choose one typeface for everything (or have fine-grained control over everything they read and view?)
I don't think this makes much sense as an argument, because you can have it either way with the status quo. The question isn't whether creators can use typesetting expressively; they clearly can, with a degree of freedom and optionality that would have blown me away when I started font nerding back in the 1990s. The question is whether I should sympathize with designers who are irritated by the licensing terms for Gotham or Brandon Grotesque (or whomever is doing per-impression licensing these days). I do not, and I think I'm on solid ground.
If Avatar can use Papyrus, I think your apps are fine with common fonts.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ
Seriously. It amazes me what one person's sense of "deep suffering" is compared to another's.
The Total Perspective Vortex comes to mind.
Yes, and no, but why and when? What makes any particular typeface more or less important had it been something different?
When I was younger and a bit more haughty about design, I would have agreed, but now I feel like I need more to substantiate the claim, even thought I feel like I agree.
> I'd argue that complaining about font prices is less like a Hermes bag, and more like complaining about high-end ingredients when a supermarket has cheap stuff. Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer.
This also needs a bit more. In what cases would some dish suffer "deeply" simply from having used commodity ingredients (a quality that's a core tenant in many famous designers' approaches)? You could more easily argue that something isn't the same as another, or perhaps less appealing visually, or perhaps less nutritionally dense, but it all seems a bit specious to me. Some cases would be significant, such as the choice of a garden tomato over a store tomato, but that's hardly a high-end concern, and why would high-end concerns be all that important anyway?
My opinion is that design is as important as the problems it solves or the outcome it produces, and the existence and selection of appropriate typefaces can be a core component in that, it would not be easy to make a strong value oriented argument for the discrete choice of one expensive typeface over another commodity typeface unless one evidently solves a problem better, or its value is already established because of the association with an existing identity that already uses it.
That's not to say they aren't worth paying for, or that licensing them isn't an issue, it's just kind of a debatable question how much one over another is worth or how important it is, much like art in general or other creative works.
If you often use custom fonts that aren't preinstalled on typical systems, I can't help but wonder whether you also painstakingly choose fonts for non-latin character/non-latin based languages?
I'll admit opening a can of worms on purpose, but if you're going for the "high-end", ignoring the i18n implications seems like a crime on its own, and yet most people don't really have the design expertise to evaluate whether a font looks good in another totally foreign language...
Non-Latin? Well, OK, Greek and Cyrillic are close enough to Latin to be able to design the font for them following approximately the same style which apply to the Latin characters. You can make a Cyrillic Tahoma or a Greek Signika in line with the Latin variants. I'd say that this is the reasonable limit of non-latin support.
If you take Hebrew, Korean, Georgian, Armenian, Thai, hiragana, katakana, you're in trouble. They all have different proportions, traditions, connections. You can stylize them a bit to be reminiscent of the way the Latin font is made, but you'll have hard time making a Hebrew font with large serifs like Bodoni, and will have hard time making it materially different from Times New Roman in a convincing way. It's better to make a separate typeface.
Arabic / Persian / Urdu, or hanji are their own worlds altogether, hardly comparable to Western typography.
Modern included fonts aren’t that bad. It’s more like using tomato sauce instead of fancy handmade chilli.
Your meal doesn’t deeply suffer, it’s just a bit bland.
And importantly... Just like with food, the overwhelming majority of people will not notice at all.
Even trained wine tasters can't tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine reliably.
Normal people can't even tell what flavor of skittle they are eating without the visual color cue.
Branding is very important.
Branding requires being distinctive, mixing novel visual and other aspects in a pleasing way.
As far as I have been able to tell no major platform ships with the universal font of fonts (full coverage of all possible fonts with 4.5Mb seed) “AnyStyleYouWant” font.
And none of the fonts they do ship have the “distinctive” feature.
Until that day comes…
Please keep your "branding" out of my UI. What I want from text in the apps I use is legibility first and foremost, not them screaming the brand at me every second I'm staring at them.
There is a large number of free qualify fonts available at fonts.google.com, many of them are free for commercial use outside the web. There is also a handful of pretty good fonts not included in that collection but also freely available. (This is on top of good collections of fonts shipped with major OSes.)
There is a number of free fonts which are also free for commercial use, but are clearly inadequate for serious typographic work, or only contain highly stylized glyphs. They may still be perfectly usable for a game, or a mobile app which is not typography-heavy. In many cases, the shortcomings are only visible at paper resolution, or only in print as opposed to screen.
Then, there is a number of not very expensive fonts that cost $50-100 per face. If you really badly need a font exactly like that for a commercial project, and $200-300 is a prohibitively expensive for a permanent license you obtain, how much is the commercial project worth? Is it worth sweating over that very particular font?
> Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer.
This heavily depends. As I mentioned before, cheaper materials did not always mean shittier, especially when it comes to cooking. Around here, healthy food is still cheaper (especially the ingredients) than junk food, although the recent increase in prices (of everything) is wild.
I guess if they are so important we should be paying for them. Not that you argue against it per se, but in discussion context.
So "Typefaces are incredibly important", just not important enough to pay for (or create yourself)???
The OP didn't say they didn't want to pay, they're saying there's been a shift toward per-impression pricing which is often unsustainable for even the most lucrative apps.
So, using the OP's own comparison, I should be able to pay a one off "saffron purchase", and then be able to use as much saffron as I want from the supermarket for every meal I ever make in the future? ;-)
No, because Saffron is a physical commodity with inherent production costs, supply chain logistics, and a finite supply. A better analogy would be that if you bought a saffron crocus, you shouldn't have to pay a monthly fee to harvest it.
This doesn't mean anything. Things are not generally sold at their bill of materials cost. If you don't want to pay what Monotype is charging, don't use Monotype faces. It's exactly that simple. There a gajillion alternative faces, and a very large number of them are of high quality.
> Things are not generally sold at their bill of materials cost
In a perfectly competitive market things are sold at cost of production + a small markup.
Do you understand what a perfectly competitive market is? Typefaces structurally cannot be one.
To buy fonts you have to care about design but not too much. If you do then you'll draw your text so it's a unique "font" instead of buying a premade font that other people can also buy.
My problem with this analogy is that there are dozens if not hundreds of free typefaces that are exceptionally high quality and have stood the test of time.
The "problem" with free typefaces isn't their quality, it's their ubiquity. Since everyone can use them, they are used everywhere. Licensing something less common can help your product stand out from the crowd.
Or you could try implementing good features to try to stand out from the crowd.
Frankly, non-default fonts outside of the logo are a red flag to me. They signal a team that has put form so far over function that the function is almost guaranteed to not be fit for purpose.
If they're profoundly important for the design of your money-making app, the principle of "fuck you, pay me" applies. If you're making $50,000 every year and you couldn't do that without the design and you couldn't do the design without the font, pay up.
If they're profoundly important for the design of your free software app... we all know how likely it is for a free software app to have good design. You'd be the first.
> Typefaces are incredibly important, and have been for centuries.
Is there hard statistical evidence for this?
> misunderstanding the importance of design
Almost every font, style, pattern, component used in any new app today has already been designed, implemented, redesigned and reimplemented 20 times over. 'The importance of design' and all of the associated rhetorical BS only really serve to keep redundant (imo) designers employed.
> like complaining about high-end ingredients when a supermarket has cheap stuff. Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer.
Can you actually make an objective argument for why certain fonts are more high-quality than existing free/open fonts, or how free/open fonts will make a product deeply suffer? I'd wager you can't.
I've worked closely with many designers behind some very popular 'nice' award-winning apps. I've listened to endless rhetorical BS about how 'this specific element of the design is incredibly important and any deviation is a major hit to the product quality'. These same designers very very rarely even notice when an incorrect font/color, styling/layout is used, while arguing that any such deviation will ruin customer trust destroy the app. Complete BS.
I don't know what a Hermès is or connotates, but I think the complaint is as much about the artificial and seemingly arbitrary restrictions as opposed to purely the price.
You can try to create a Veblen good out of a digital artifact and play the all or nothing game, but it's proven very hard to restrict something which can be copied at no cost and with no limitations.
When you buy expensive clothes, it would be silly for the seller to try and license them to be only worn on Mondays, or at dress-code events, or based on your taxable income. People are not going to take your "license" seriously, even if you'd have some legal grounds and might well win a legal argument.
I have a great deal of admiration for artists and designers, and I know that creating a multiple-variant typeface with great applicability that's either historically correct or truly innovative is an art form.
This reminds me of Napster-era debates about artists' rights versus distribution.
It’s not uncommon to require clients to develop a relationship with the retailer before they’re allowed to buy the more exclusive goods. It’s not the same as the licensing analogy but it’s close.
Imagine needing to spend 300% of an item’s cost at the retailer before you’re allowed the chance to buy the thing you actually want.
> When you buy expensive clothes, it would be silly for the seller to try and license them to be only worn on Mondays, or at dress-code events, or based on your taxable income. People are not going to take your "license" seriously, even if you'd have some legal grounds and might well win a legal argument.
That's why the usual approach, especially in this industry, is to not give people choice in the first place - this is achieved by renting, instead of selling.
Clothes as a Service is already a thing. A CaaS with excessively specific restriction of use? Might not be - yet. No doubt someone will try it.
Hermes doesn't forbid you from wearing your watch or charge 10x more for you to wear it while playing a mobile game.
I think a lot of the anger is more about the complexity and price discrimination than the absolute price.
If Hermès did forbid me from carrying my (hypothetical) wallet more than 3 times a week, I simply would not buy that wallet. It would not become a moral crusade.
But they'd deserve to be mocked in public. Complaining about something is usually not an attempt to make a moral crusade.
Why? Everybody can just not buy the wallet if they care about this term of use. Who's being harmed?
This isn't nitpicking. At some point you're really effectively just arguing that there should be a ceiling on what you can charge for a typeface. That's not an argument that respects the art and craft of type design; it's one that privileges convenience.
> Why? Everybody can just not buy the wallet if they care about this term of use. Who's being harmed?
Either because it's ridiculous and fun to laugh at, or to scare other companies off the idea, or both.
It being a luxury product that people can avoid is not a reason to keep my mouth shut.
> At some point you're really effectively just arguing that there should be a ceiling on what you can charge for a typeface. That's not an argument that respects the art and craft of type design; it's one that privileges convenience.
Okay, to switch back to typefaces, I don't get the impression they're complaining about the high end, I get the impression they're complaining about the average.
And if an entire class of product suddenly becomes luxury with onerous terms... that sucks! Do complain! It was working fine before!
But that clearly isn't happening. You have never had more access to high-end typefaces than you do today. What people are mad about is the licensing attached to --- literally --- the Hermès of type design. To get higher-level than the targets of these complaints you have to get into bespoke design.
This came up earlier in the thread, and I kept someone else on the hook on this: I honestly think that it would be a good thing for the world if font licensing got more onerous, not less. Type design is a very difficult field to make a living in, and the world could use more of it. The social cost of making high-end type more expensive is negative, not positive.
> What people are mad about is the licensing attached to --- literally --- the Hermès of type design.
Hmm, okay. If that's true then OP is just wrong.
The problem is this argument wasn't clear from your initial comment. You claimed that there were plenty of excellent free options, while they claimed that the market had generally gone to very onerous pricing. Both of those can be true at the same time.
But if most of the market hasn't done that, and they're only looking at the top, then okay they're wrong.
No, not a ceiling, but rather less baroque terms of use / price structure, I'd say. It's like licensing software per CPU core, and / or with a separate license with separate conditions for every of the two dozen components of software. These have been ridiculed because people who end up working with that get bothered and want to vent. Should not be a moral crusade though; a crusade to "liberate" someone else's property, as opposed to creating and maintaining something free, has a different name.
In my experience part of the pain is having some decision-maker or stake-holder getting married to a design during the mockup phase. A lot of the mockup generators will use fonts you'll have to license later for free in the mockup.
I feel like you're arguing against a point GP entirely didn't make. GP is saying there's a market mismatch here - there's money on the table that font makers are ignoring, and simultaneously apps end up using uglier default fonts. Both parties could benefit from meeting in the middle.
I agree except for the "piracy would be less of a problem" thing.
There are very few fonts that exist in all the major platforms. But there are excellent free and open source fonts that you can use. I also want to point out that if you make an "app" and publish it on a platform like appstore, you are basically a slave to the platform.
I'd say the same about shows and movies, which is where the supermajority of this conversation is typically focused, especially given how much free content is over YouTube.
I do believe that about shows and movies and have argued that point here in the past, but it's especially true of typefaces.
Do you consider fonts largely useless, overpriced and primarily directed at customers who seek to display status symbols? Because that's the analogy, I'm not sure I agree.
But the prices are off the charts, and it's the usual private-equity buying up the competition & their IP and then squeezing as much as they can. Not sure why that's worth rooting for.
Hermès sells a $5000 wallet.
Well if the same font could be independently discovered, would your view change at all? Of course at high resolutions this is unlikely but I feel like if I made the same image within 5 pixels wide and 9 pixels high and two colors as some font it might be accused of being similar, much like with some accusations in music.
The fonts loaded on one machine are typically not loaded reliably on all machines, so you need to distribute fonts with your application. Doing this is probably a violation of the license that all those "free fonts" were distributed under, so your only options are:
1. Public Domain Fonts
2. Fonts that cost money
The set of public domain fonts is pretty small and most of them are low quality - not all, thankfully - and out of the ones that don't suck a lot of them only support the latin character set.
As for fonts that cost money, just to give you one example, I recently asked a foundry what it would cost to license a font for my indie game. Their quote was $1100/yr with a ceiling of 300k copies sold (so I'd need to come back and pay them more on a yearly basis and the cost would go up if I was successful). This was only for 3 variants - regular, italic and medium - and only for the latin character set. For one typeface.
Certainly if I was throwing around millions of dollars I could pay that without blinking, but it's far out of reach for independent developers (and they know I'm independent)
Lots of games distribute "baked fonts", where the ttf/otf is statically rendered into a bunch of texture atlases and they ship the atlases instead of the font. Many font licenses I've seen don't permit this kind of use, so I suspect a lot of games are actually in violation of their font licenses, if they paid to license their fonts at all.
Hell, just the other day I prepared a PowerPoint presentation for work using one of the stock Office fonts and then I opened it in Office on another machine and the font was missing...
There is a large range of permissive licensing between public domain and "fonts that cost money". Free as in freedom Linux distros ship a sizable set of fonts, and I'm sure most of them are licensed permissively.
What? There's an endless supply of permissively licensed fonts, eg on Google Fonts. Many of them are actually pretty good. Yes, you'll find some bad ones too.
I've been meaning to roll my own font with https://github.com/glyphr-studio/Glyphr-Studio-2 but I've never gotten around to it. Then you can build on top of the public domain fonts or properly license fonts on Google Fonts.
I guess you’ve never worked with one of those designers whose friend’s cofounder’s VC’s boyfriend shops at Neeman Marcus. Try telling one of them they have to use a normal legible tried and true font :s
> I guess these font sellers imagine there’s still some app boom - a Klondike rush with developers bathing in dollars.
The way this works is the design team picks some font, uses it on all of the design proposals, gets it approved by management, and then only later does a developer realize it’s a paid font they’ve been asked to put in the app. The teams want to avoid going back for design change approvals so eventually they just give up and pay the money.
It’s not developers picky boutique expensive fonts, in my experience. It’s the designers who don’t think about the consequences because by they point it’s off their plate.
To be fair though, there’s so many open source fonts out there of good quality that you don’t have to pay anyone to use their font. Why go against copyright laws when you can just use fonts like Roboto (or really, anything on Google Fonts) for free?
As a mostly now digital designer I get it... but also realize that digital has the capacity to scale instantly where print doesnt. Want to get 40 million editions out digitally? Gimme a sec. Physically? Gonna need to get some investment capital and a few years ramp up.
I really good font is a fine work of craftsmanship that is time consuming to make. The type designer deserves compensation for their work.
There are also plenty of license free, and B-tier fonts available if you are on a tight budget.
This maybe isn't relevant to your point, but the story in question is from long before mobile apps.
Also, just for anyone cruising the comments before reading the story, it is more about the "You wouldn't steal a car" PSA's from >20-ish years ago. I don't recall there being any explicit advocacy for font licensing anywhere in it.
And god forbid you to accidently ship the font with your game or mobile app! :)
How does one even use a font in an app without shipping it with the app? In a logo or something?
By using a font that is guaranteed to be provided by the system on which the app is running. Both Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android all make such guarantees.
Linux DEs generally don't, but perhaps they should, given that open fonts with decent quality and extensive coverage are out there. Something like the Noto family.
You can trace it, I guess...
What if you convert it to bitmap, instead of shipping a TTF/WOFF/etc? Does it still counts as shipping the font... or not?
No, because a font is licensed as a computer program that generates those glyphs. The glyphs themselves aren’t copyrightable.
And if you generate a set of bitmaps/sprites of individual glyphs from the font (e.g. to use as a bitmap font in a game), is that different to shipping an image with more specific uses of the font baked in, e.g. a logo/title image?
Why not just use free fonts? There are so many available that are perfectly good for most use-cases.
Legally they’re software so yeah it’s the same as licensing a proprietary piece of code.
I've only purchased one font, which I use in my editor and terminal, so I don't have to worry much about the license. I can't be bothered to use custom fonts for any projects. With all the licensing considerations it just makes me cut out the whole idea to simplify my life.
Send in the LLMs!
Jokes aside, I'm not very impressed with this single color font art. Maybe in 30 years we will have 16 color fonts?
The color fonts currently work in Firefox and Edge, Safari support SBIX, Chrome on Android has CBDT
I can barely find a website that has an example. The ones I found have a few characters or a single sentence, very few fonts and they are not very pretty. Some of the implementations warn that the client might catch fire.
I'm not impressed.
Some random examples of the state of the art.
https://www.throwup.it/en/artists/mars/
I only purchase fonts for graphic design projects (mostly branding). For UIs I'm perfectly happy with Google Fonts.
I haven't bought a ton of fonts, but iirc the licensing from US Graphics was pretty reasonable for software distribution. It was something like an extra $200 for app usage for an indie developer.
In general, AFAIK, the general assumption is every font is absurdly easy to steal, and that you'll do so before purchasing it.
So it's de facto "free unlimited trial, free for personal use, pay for business if you have a soul and shame"
Depends on the country.
I researched it for Russia recently and apparently the law is much stricter about fonts here than in the US. Both the character shapes and the "code" are copyrightable so you ain't getting away with converting it into a different format either. Companies did get sued over this and did have to pay millions of rubles in fines and licensing fees for their past usage. Not sure about individuals but I wouldn't try my luck with any non-free fonts made by Russian designers.
> I wouldn't try my luck with any non-free fonts made by Russian designers.
Depends if your home country cares about Russian civil court or not.
Huh, this is interesting. Given that Russia has been the hub of internet piracy for theast three decades.
That's because copyright in Russia is only enforced for companies. If you pirate something for personal use, no one would care, thankfully.
I would suggest not pushing your luck with webfonts though, because in that case you are distributing the actual copyrighted "code" of the font, not just the minimally protected shapes that it outputs. There are services which crawl the web actively looking for pirated webfonts on behalf of foundries (and their lawyers).
I had this happen to a client and even though they had both the web and print licenses they were hit with a 50k suite because the font file was malformed somehow. I'm not sure how it shook out but I hope they didn't pay a god damn cent.
How robust is that identification? Does it just look for file hashes or identical character shapes? I imagine it is trivial to repackage a font file to break the hash fingerprint.
Got a link to such a service?
https://www.fontradar.com is one. They also claim to analyze apps somehow.
A diffusion model for fonts. Isn't it time they get ripped off too? /SARCASM
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43776539
font licensing feels like it never caught up with how software actually gets made now. charging more for app use than for mass print always seemed backwards, especially when indie devs are scraping by and a font costs more than your backend. no wonder people end up using “free alternatives” without looking too hard at where they came from.
I am of the opinion that the licenses for fonts in software are too expensive, but why is the pricing ‘backwards’? Book publishers don’t make a lot of profit, while software developers do.
> Book publishers don’t make a lot of profit, while software developers do.
Do you have a citation for that?
Printing a book costs just about nothing, it’s astonishingly cheap to print a quality book in volume. Author royalties are not that high (I suppose famous authors whose name alone sell books is another story), then you have retail margins and overhead.
The top three book publishers’ have sales in the low billions with operating margins in the 10 - 20% range.
It is a healthy industry even if it is smaller than it used to be.
The one problem with books is that shipping an individual book to a single consumer costs a far more than printing the book, but there is zero shipping and zero printing costs for ebooks, just the retailer margin.
Short answer: Nobody fucking knows because the accounting is more non-GAAP than your typical investment fraud house.
A few spots for folks interested in some amount of numbers:
https://slate.com/culture/2024/04/book-sales-publishing-indu...
https://archive.is/nGY6D
https://janefriedman.com/book-pl/
Book publishing is at least as bad as VC work. You publish a lot of books to have a catalog, and a few books make inordinately more money than the rest which keeps the lights on. New printings sound cheap enough, but a lot of books don’t get many of those. The long tail is very flat.
And as for the authors, most would make a lot more money tutoring for the same number of hours of effort they put into the book. Those appearance fees might make it better, but how many people get those?
> while software developers do.
Ouch!
What is wrong with me then?
Whatever the answer, I would caution you to listen carefully to the most product / marketing centric person who dares speak up.
Font licensing feels like God tier product marketing.
That is an absolutely brilliant turn of events – strong evidence that the font in an anti-piracy campaign was itself arguably a copyright-infringing knock-off.
Someone should sue FACT for copyright infringement – and refuse to settle.
The song is also stolen: it’s an unauthorised interpolation of one man army by the prodigy:
https://open.spotify.com/track/65zwPZvsUCU55IpyWddFsK?si=bBf...
How does that square with this article, which says that the music was composed by Dutch musician Melchior Rietveldt specifically for the ad? (And that they failed to pay him properly for the use of the music.)
https://torrentfreak.com/rights-group-fined-for-not-paying-a...
Melchior Rietveldt’s work was for a different antipiracy ad
https://torrentfreak.com/sorry-the-you-wouldnt-steal-a-car-a...
You can't copyright a font.
A typeface design, in the U.S., no, but the digital font file comprising outline data and instructions, according to current U.S. law, for an overview of current case law and a proposal see:
https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/chtlj/vol10/iss1/5/
There's no evidence XBAND Rough was extracted from a digital source bit-for-bit, unless someone can point to any?
It seems like it was just a hobbyist project to recreate the look of the font from the anti-piracy ads? Which is 100% legal.
Edit: OK, so the original font appears to be "FF Confidential"? Why didn't the post even mention that? So maybe it is a digital clone, which would be illegal. But then strange that there aren't any DMCA takedowns of it on major font sites?
In this case it seems like what happened was:
1. Catapult Entertainment made/commissioned XBAND Rough as a clone of Confidential for their use somewhere (promotional materials, PC software, who knows?). The font file contains the text "Copyright 1996 Catapult Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved".
2. The "You wouldn't steal a car" campaign pirated Catapult's copyrighted font file. I think they got away with it because Catapult was no longer in business at that point. They were acquired by Mpath Interactive in 1996 and Mpath's IP got acquired by GameSpy in 2000.
Idk if it's provable how it was recreated but if you type in "XBAND Rough" into the sampler box at the bottom of the page https://www.myfonts.com/collections/ff-confidential-font-fon... and compare to https://fontzone.net/font-details/xband-rough it's exactly the same and the letter splotching is very distinct in the lower case letters.
"It looks the same" is completely different than having been directly extracted from digital source.
If the digital source is the only thing that can be copyrighted, then you have to prove the digital source is what was used inappropriately. If you can't prove that, either because it didn't happen or because there's no technological way to prove it, then you can't prove copyright infringement.
Ages ago, I consulted on a case where a converted font was included in a product --- it was even simpler than https://luc.devroye.org/kinch.html since no transformations were applied --- just had to figure out which version of which font editor was used to open up the font file and then which settings were used to re-generate the font in the new format used for the infringing product.
I'm not saying it's never possible in any case, just that in cases where it's not you can't prove infringement.
If I were going to knock it off I'd duplicate the splotching exactly, too. I'd prepare as sample as a bitmap, use any of the various raster-to-vector tracers on it to get an SVG, clean up the SVG of any conversion artifacts, then make it into a type format. (Heck, there's probably a fun problem in here to train an algorithm to do the cleanup and conversion. You could probably knock-off the hinting and ligatures, too.)
XBAND Rough could not have been inspired by those ads, as the OP shows the ads are using XBAND, and not FF Confidential, the original tyepface it cloned.
We don’t know what the ads (meaning, the videos) used. We only know what was on their website.
If it were the same file, it wouldn't be a "knock-off." It would be something like Optifonts. Very frowned upon, but definitely not illegal. Also, the kerning is usually trash, there will be way too many nodes in the vectors, and things may be missing. Annoying to work with, but in the case of Optifonts, free (because they're long out of business.)
http://abfonts.freehostia.com/opti/
https://luc.devroye.org/fonts-27506.html
Maybe not in the US, but fonts do enjoy copyright protection in at least some European markets.[1] I frequently encountered this campaign on DVDs for rent in the local Blockbuster equivalents, so I don't think it is entirely theoretical infringement, either.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti... and forward
FACT/FAST are a UK organisation, where font copyright is espressly enumerated in the copyright law.
They absolutely are copyrighted and big money.
In the US you can't copyright the shape of a font. You can copyright the programmatic description of a font.
Design patents have been awarded for fonts. Trademark and trade dress protections could apply to the specific use of a font but not the font itself. The name of a font itself can be protected by trademark, as well.
It's kind of a fascinating topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...
Edit: Back in the mid-90s versions of Corel Draw came with a Truetype editor. A friend of mine made "knock off" versions of fonts they liked from magazines, etc, and made them freely available on his ISP-provided web space. They drew them by hand, using printed samples as the inspiration.
Over the years they got some angry messages from a few "type people" who didn't like that they'd made freely available knock-offs of various fonts. (I remember that "Keedy Sans" is one they knocked-off and got a particularly angry email about.)
Further aside: My fiend made a sans serif typeface that has a distinct pattern of "erosion" at the edges and voids within the letters. It's easy to tell when it's the font he made. For the last 30 years I've kept samples of the various places I've seen it used, both on the Internet and on physical articles. I find it so amazing that a TTF file made by a kid in Corel Draw in 1994 or 1995 ended up being used in advertisements, on packaging, etc.
In the 90s Corel Draw came with a Helvetica named Swiss. Microsoft wasn't as bold and called theirs Arial.
Corel's "Swiss" font is identical to Helvetica. Arial has many differences.
But you can Copyright the Name of a font. But yes long standing rule says you can copyright how letters & numbers look. Note that if you make a font that contains your own “artwork’ that does not represent a letter or number you can get protection for that.
And only fairly recently (in the past 30 years—I forget when Adobe won this court case) the courts ruled you can protect the code for generating a fonts look from being copied.
You can't copyright the name of a font in the US. You can trademark it.
> In the US you can't copyright the shape of a font. You can copyright the programmatic description of a font.
The organization in question is a UK organization, and you can in fact copyright a font in the UK. The US is unrelated to this issue.
You can, entirely legally, make a copy of any font and distribute it freely.
You can't copy the font files themselves, but you can make visually indistinguishable new fonts with the same shapes because the shapes are not protected by copyright.
Additionally though, some fonts have design patents, which does protect the shape. Unlike copyright which has absolutely crazy expiration (like 150 years occasionally?) these patents only cover 15 to 20 years or shorter if abandoned.
An example of Apple patenting a font valid 2017 to 2032: https://patents.google.com/patent/USD786338S1/en
So if I already have the file (legally acquired or not), I'm free to use it for print? Cause obviously distributing T-shirts isn't distributing font files?
In the US, yes.
It depends on if it has a design patent on it or not.
"You wouldn't copyright a font"
You can copyright just about anything as long as you have the _money_
T-Mobile trademarked a very specific pink, "Magenta"
There’s even a company that holds trademarks on a set of colors, Pantone.
Courts have yet to reverse or revoke these silly trademarks.
Trademark and copyright are not the same thing..
T-Mobile does not have a trademark on the color magenta, nor does Pantone on any colors.
The trademark is for using that color to market your product such that a buyer might assume they are buying T-mobile, but in reality they are not.
Or for Pantone, that a buyer is buying a color quality controlled by Pantone.
Trademark != copyright.
> was itself arguably a copyright-infringing knock-off.
In US law, there is no such thing. The shape of a glyph (or many) isn't even slightly copyrightable. This is settled law. Fonts (on computers) have a special status that makes them semi-copyrightable in that some jackass judge from the 1980s called them "computer programs" and so they have the same protection as software... but this won't protect against knockoffs.
Well they're programs tbf
Is this fair? It actually takes a lot of work (I assume) to design letter's shapes. Of course, not counting those who just trace 16-th century font without paying a compensation.
> Of course, not counting those who just trace 16-th century font without paying a compensation
I can't tell which way you mean this, but that sounds similar to the situation with most public domain musical compositions - the manuscripts may be completely open but a specific typesetting can still under copyright. And like that case, "just" tracing a font / typesetting a composition is still a fair amount of work.
Who are you paying for a 400-year old font? Who deserves to get paid for a 400-year old font?
> takes a lot of work
The "sweat of the brow" argument is not valid in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow
>Under the Feist ruling in the US, mere collections of facts are considered unoriginal and thus not protected by copyright, no matter how much work went into collating them.
This person isn't just collecting existing letter shapes; inventing a new letter shapes would be protected by copyright?
> inventing a new letter shapes would be protected by copyright?
It is settled law that letter shapes aren't copyrightable. Period.
You aren't inventing a new letter shapes - letters already exist. You are modifying how they look, and that's not considered creative enough.
There are lots of things that can't be copyrighted.
For example you can't copyright an anatomy drawing: https://www.skeletaldrawing.com/licensing (i.e. the layout of the bones, etc) but you can copyright your specific drawing - but someone else could draw in the same style and not violate your copyright.
Same here: You can't copyright the shape of the letters, but you can copyright you specific ttf program (expression), but someone else can make the same letter shapes if they want.
You can say the same about drawing of a cat: you are not inventing new animal here. But for some weird reason cats are copyrighted and letters are not.
There are many ways to draw the same letter, as there are many ways to draw a cat.
Also if one draws letters that look like cats, will they fall under copyright protection?
If someone draws a cat, and the next person draws basically the same cat, there is no copyright infringement.
You need something "extra", some kind of style that is distinct.
I'm not saying your drawing has no copyright - it does, if someone reproduces it exactly that's illegal. I'm saying if someone makes the same type of drawing, in the same style, that's not infringement - even if they looked at yours, as long as they drew it themselves.
They are computer programs. Not sure why you’d crudely insult the judge for saying that.
Are fonts really programs? Is a digital image file also a program?
A font file is more like a config that’s used by your OS to render something, there’s no real interactivity in fonts (except some ligatures but those are just static tables, right?).
TrueType, which has been around since the 80s, includes a full Turing-complete instruction set for hinting: https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-Reference-Manual/...
This is sophistry. Does anyone write apps in ttf? Can I download a calendar app? Has anyone even cranked out some proof of concept?
Fonts aren't software in any meaningful sense of the word.
We’re talking about copyright here. A typeface on its own isn’t copyrightable. The judge ruled that turning a typeface into a digital font involves writing a nontrivial computer program, which is a creative work under US copyright law. That simply is true. It doesn’t matter whether you can write “apps” in TrueType; you can write digital fonts in it.
https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html
Fonts aren't just programs, they can contain and run an entire AI model to give you access to an LLM in any program running Harfbuzz: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40766791
I would say that counts as interactivity.
Yes. And they're also copyrightable.
That's why this shit is so stupid.
Many things are copyrightable that shouldn't be. When you can spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress to get them to extend copyright protections beyond reason, that tends to happen.
In the United States, it is settled precedent that typefaces are not copyrightable. That doesn't change just because they became digital in 1984.
They stole the music too.
Anti-pirating ad music stolen [2013]: https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/01/29/3678851.h...
If one didn't know better, one could conclude the history of this ad campaign suggests it was performance art done by creatives ideologically opposed to the client.
I'm sure these artist-loving folks just paid the very cheapest ad/video agency they could find to make this that seemed capable of completing the project, and that agency was the kind of place that does sloppy stuff like that (many do, haha).
I would happily pay for any font if I could get individual weights for say $5-$10 and entire families for $20-100 with any usage I want (print, web, etc). I feel like font foundries would print money this way. But for most projects, $300+ for a nice family (that can only be used in a hyper-specific context) is just insane when many free or cheaper alternatives exist.
Used to waste time and money with foundry stuff until Google Fonts caught up. Now I typically source something from there unless it's essential to the design.
I suspect they are printing more money with the 1-10 megacorps who can afford to pay millions of dollars for per-eyeballs licenses.
I suspect it is probably right that they would find it more profitable to sell 100 copies for $10 than 1 copy for $1000. But I do wonder, it could be that the occasional $10,000 sale to a large company pays more in the long run for less hassle. It’s hard to know. Do any creative agencies release their sales information?
I’d say there should at least be a small niece for a company to profit off the back of less expensive more reasonably licensed font sales. I don’t know how many lawyers a small company would need to do this though. Would they be sued by Adobe (either for fonts that look similar, or with pointless lawsuits just to wear them out?)
Part of the value may be in how exclusive the font seems. So in that view 1 sale of $1000 is more valuable because it’s more exclusive. Basically, one potential attribute of fonts is they’re a luxury not a commodity.
I don't know if this actually counts as copyright infringement, since typeface shapes are not eligible for copyright in the U.S. (disclaimer: IANAL) so depending on how it was cloned, it might be legal.
The more amusing detail, to me, is whether or not XBAND Rough is related to the XBAND peripheral for video game consoles in the 90s. (Fascinating story, it was an add-on that enabled multiplayer over a phoneline on the SEGA Genesis/MegaDrive and Super Nintendo/Super Famicom.) Seems silly, however there is at least one source that seems to corroborate this idea, crediting the font to Catapult Entertainment, the company behind the XBAND:
https://fontz.ch/browse/designer/catapultentertainmen
Of course, this could've just been someone else guessing; I can't really find any solid sources for the origin of this font.
Thanks for emphasising the US perspective, because it matters.
IAAL outside the US, and I'm aware in UK and EU law copyright can subsist in typefaces, and there are specific provisions relating to them. Since FACT is a UK Org, taking UK law as an example, see ref. []
I personally find it a good example of aging law. It's quite difficult to reconcile the law as drafted (in 1987) with modern digital font uses. Is a PDF with embedded fonts "material produced by typesetting", or is it an "article specifically designed or adapted for producing material in a particular typeface"? Arguably it could be either.
I'm not aware of this ever having been considered by a court.
[] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/part/I/chapter/...
> I personally find it a good example of aging law. It's quite difficult to reconcile the law as drafted (in 1987) with modern digital font uses.
Bizarrely, it seems like the precedent has only gotten stronger since 1987. It was re-affirmed again by the Code of Federal Regulations, § 202.1[1], in 1992. Honestly, I don't fully understand why. I know that U.S. copyright law generally limits the ability to copyright things that do not involve sufficient originality or creativity, but while all typeface outlines are the same basic shapes, there's still plenty of room for creativity.
I also know that the U.S. is also not entirely alone in generally considering typefaces ineligible for copyright protection; I believe Japan also has a similar position. Maybe eventually, it will shift.
> IAAL outside the US, and I'm aware in UK and EU law copyright can subsist in typefaces, and there are specific provisions relating to them. Since FACT is a UK Org, taking UK law as an example, see ref.
Oh, I honestly didn't even realize FACT was a UK organization; I didn't really know a whole lot about them other than the commercial.
That makes this situation a bit more awkward, as Catapult was, IIRC, based in Cupertino, so Catapult may have not been breaking any U.S. copyright laws, even though their typeface would presumably be illicit by UK law. That said, they were possibly breaking Dutch copyright laws, and I'm not sure what happens there. I suppose that comes down to the nitty gritty of how international copyright treaties work, and I am way out of my depth there.
[1]: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-37/chapter-II/subchapter-...
It is related. The font file contains the text "Copyright 1996 Catapult Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved". I'm not sure where it comes from because the SNES/Genesis/Saturn versions of the service didn't use it. Maybe it comes from the short-lived PC XBAND service?
> It is related. The font file contains the text "Copyright 1996 Catapult Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved".
Wow! I should've thought to check that.
> I'm not sure where it comes from because the SNES/Genesis/Saturn versions of the service didn't use it. Maybe it comes from the short-lived PC XBAND service?
My guess was going to be that it was used in marketing copy, but that doesn't explain how it wound up distributed apparently freely. The idea that it is related to the PC XBAND service seems likely to me, though. The dates line up, based on this press release:
http://www.gamezero.com/team-0/whats_new/past/xband-pc.html
I find it pretty funny that the American legal system explicitly doesn't copyright fonts (which are quite obviously creative works, in my opinion) but still enforces software patents.
Copyright for most (if not all) fonts seems like something that just shouldn’t work. We want things in the public domain, like Shakespeare, and we want derivative works protected. Fonts are tiny differences on public domain work that 90% of people can’t tell. You wouldn’t want Disney to claim every pencil stroke difference on Mikey’s to be subject to different copyright terms, it would become a kind of perpetual copyright strategy. If there are true technical improvements to the way we represent letters, they should be covered by patents, with their shorter terms.
How do you encourage people to continue making new typefaces if anyone could use them immediately? FWIW, it does take significant time to design individual typefaces. It’s not just a set of characters: it’s the character in lowercase and uppercase, how letters appear differently when adjacent to certain other letters, punctuation, etc.
A significant amount of time goes into the process.
What saddens me is that a lot of people are so ignorant that they don't even realize a font is something that takes creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort to design.
I remember trying to explain to some colleagues why I paid about 100 bucks for the font I use and why I wouldn’t share it with them and they just couldn’t get it.
(It’s Berkeley mono).
I don’t even know how many glyphs it is (it’s thousands) but for something I’m looking at for 6-8 hours a day, every single day and is the absolute peak of perfection (at least to me), 100 bucks seems like a fucking bargain to me.
shrug I guess these folks never sold something they made completely by themselves maybe.
>shrug I guess these folks never sold something they made completely by themselves maybe.
Not saying font designers shouldn't get paid, but they mostly aren't making things "completely by themselves", they are mostly making derivative works from things that exist, without any consideration for the original authors.
What do you suppose they should do to the original authors? Perhaps the original author is Claude Garamond who died in the sixteenth century? Or the unknown workers who carved the inscription at Trajan's column in the second century AD?
So you understand the issue, it's derivative works all the way down.
When people say "make completely by themselves", they don't mean that were not influenced by literally no prior works. Artists can say they painted an original work entirely by themselves without needing a pedant to mention that they were probably influenced by prior work.
Clearly nothing based on Latin script can be original, which itself is based on the Etruscan Old italic alphabet, which itself it based on the Euboean alphabet — ergo, any typeface developed after say the 8th century BC is just a silly derivative.
Everything is derivative, there is nothing new under the sun, and your argument proves nothing.
at a high enough level of abstraction, all creative work is derivative. wouldn't call it an "issue"
>at a high enough level of abstraction, all creative work is derivative.
Sure, but with fonts you have basically one level between the font they are 'developing' and the one they are copying from. There is work involved, but very little of it is creative work.
The "peak of perfection" does not support even just European languages, not having full coverage even for Latin scripts. But it's a "love letter for the golden age of computing", and the golden age had massive problems with scripts for languages other than English, so maybe it's intentional.
https://usgraphics.com/static/products/TX-02/datasheet/TX-02...
Hey, Berkeley Mono supports most Western European languages, can you tell me what's missing? I can add it. Btw, the tagline is about the aesthetics. :)
Hi Neil, I'm not that person you replied to but in my projects I require Cyrillic glyphs for Russian and Ukrainian texts. Also when checking out your website just now, I wasn't able to add a Berkeley Mono App License module in your ordering system. I assume I need a App License to embed the font in my app? But I also can't seem to find any information about the app license itself on your site as well.
Cyrillic is not supported so Berkeley Mono might not be suitable for your application. Are you building a Web app (Webfonts) or a Desktop/Mobile app (App license)? Please email me.
The lack of the ohm symbol Ω is also quite a bummer given the technical domain of the font.
Agree, I need to work on the full greek glyphset.
If you could remember to include Ancient Greek (pre 1980) accent combinations that would be awesome. It’s not that many extra accents.
(Many Greek fonts today don’t draw the accents and breathings that are used in older texts)
Is it a mistake, on page 4 of the linked datasheet, that "SemiBold" is shown for two different weights? I can't help but think that something like "DemiBold" was what the lighter weight was supposed to be labeled.
Yes, that's a typo. Need to redo the entire datasheet and possibly find a way to automate it using reportlab or some other PDF library. Right now, it is in InDesign and it is a pain to keep updating it.
I've been using Typst to generate PDF reports and it's pretty nice.
What percentage of monospace text on the internet uses random obscure glyphs? This isn't really a practical problem.
Pretty much anyone coding in another language. Coders do sometimes buy fonts if they are into fonts and nice terminals.
> shrug I guess these folks never sold something they made completely by themselves maybe
Ignoring that they likely didn’t make it completely by themselves (standing on the shoulders of giants and such), it’s quite possible that those people don’t believe that a file should cost money. I’ve made a few things as close to “completely by myself” as possible and given them away for free, and those were physical objects - I lose it when I give it away! I have absolutely no problem giving away 1s and 0s for free, I can make as many copies of the original as I want with no additional effort.
Of course we don’t live in a world where everyone can follow their passions without needing money in return for sharing the result with the world, so it’s fully understandable people want to sell their art. It’s disingenuous and reductive to assume that anyone who doesn’t want to pay for art has never made anything completely by themselves, though.
Same for me, same font, same logic. The author put a lot of hands-on work into making something I stare at all day long. I even just bought a license for a friend for his birthday because I love it.
But I'm not sharing my copy with anyone else. This isn't insulin or something. They'll be just fine without it.
> Berkeley Mono
Link for the lazy https://neil.computer/notes/berkeley-mono-font-variant-popul...
And ofc there was a HN discussion;
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38322793
how does that work? you set this font to be used by all your computers and devices?
Never really considered it, but taking a quick glance: yes, I'd pay $100 for that too, especially as my main font for programming interface.
I've made a couple of fonts. Very bad ones. I know firsthand they absolutely take creativity and tradecraft.
A well made font, from an artistic perspective, is a thing of beauty-- particularly when it incorporates subtle visual themes and nuances. It's definitely more than just "drawing the alphabet". There are also metric ass-tons of glyphs necessary to make a usable font.
Likewise, a properly hinted digital font file, especially with little touches like ligatures, is also a thing of utilitarian beauty. It's a ton of work to get that right.
That the shapes of fonts can't be protected by copyright isn't a new idea. Anybody who makes a font today should know that going in. I wouldn't make a font with the expectation of getting paid outside of doing it for a specific commission. Doing it "for the love" and expecting to get paid seems like a losing business proposition.
>What saddens me is that a lot of people are so ignorant that they don't even realize a font is something that takes creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort to design.
Except most of the creative part was done 100 years ago and companies are now trying to protect the fact that they digitized something that has existed for a century or longer.
Not every font is digitized from old samples.
They are still mostly derivative works in basically every sense.
This broad generalization can apply to any creative endeavor such as music, movies, books, and TV series you know?
Confidently asserted obvious falsehood
It's not obvious to me. Could you explain what makes fonts non-derivative?
In what way are fonts derivative that doesn't apply to everything else that is created?
It's not about ignorance. There are so many things you interact with every day that take "creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort" that it's impossible to be aware of the details of each one. At some point you just have to abstract that stuff away and go on with your day.
No kidding. As part of a mapping project I worked on, I created a set of 200+ custom SVG icons. I used Inkscape and hand-drew most of the shapes or modified existing glyphs from icon fonts or other raw vector graphic sources. This took months of work and planning, and I even figured out how to use Inkscape’s batch scripting API to automate some things. It was one of the most tedious things I’ve worked on and I am very proud of it. And as far as I know, it’s still in use today by the customer.
I think it is perhaps important to realise that while what you say is true, that is not what is protected by copyright. As others have said in these comments, if the font had been copied using the digital data then it may be a copyright infringement, but if the duplicate font had been constructed from scratch to be a visually identical font then it may not be a copyright infringement.
>> What saddens me is that a lot of people are so ignorant that they don't even realize a font is something that takes creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort to design.
I get that an average computer user who just views content might not. But as soon as you start creating stuff and even searching for and downloading a font you like I'd think some kind of mental bell would ring like "oh, these are a thing. Like some type of commodity."
The problem is that there are so many free fonts that most people take them for granted. And honestly, I don't blame most folks for thinking that way because there isn't a good reason for the average person to pay for a font. If you're just making wedding invites or signage for an event or some other one-off thing, you probably don't care.
If you're a professional using them in your work, that's an entirely different story, and you are significantly more likely to appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into making them.
TIL: font designs are not copyrightable in the USA. Font files are but the design itself is not. It seems you are free to copy the design, but not the file. Not sure how that plays out in practice. Is it common to copy a font design or is it just more common to be inspired by a font design but make a new font that's in the same general design space? Like say Arial seems inspired by Helvetica but is not the same.
There are definitely fonts that are nearly identical copies, e.g. Palladio is a clone of Palatino (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatino#Free_and_open-source_...)
Looking forward to someone doing the same for Gill Sans and most of the Monotype catalog now that they've switched to annual licensing for webfonts (pay once use forever is gone)
Also the creator of Gill Sans—Eric Gill—sexually abused his children and dog. Licensing aside I wouldn’t touch this font with a 12 foot pole
It’s clearly not the same font (you can see visible differences between the letters), and therefore not pirated. The appearance of a typeface can’t be copyrighted in the US - only the digital instructions used to render them (e.g. if someone visually inspects a font and clones it that is perfectly alright, as long as they don’t directly copy from and adapt the underlying font file).
I know we don't really do humor on HN, but working in the car industry, this comedic Aussie rebuttal always amused me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fb7N-JtQWGI
It's also one of the funniest scenes of The IT Crowd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg
I spent some time last weekend playing with LLMs and SVGs- it turns out SVG is a domain specific language and LLMs know how to use it. I was able to get an LLM (grok from X.ai) to author SVGs from a description of what I wanted it to look like, and to modify existing SVG text to customize files that weren’t perfectly to my liking.
Fonts are also written in domain specific languages, I need to experiment with whether LLMs can author or modify fonts.
I do not think that the ridiculous terms that font and clip art and stock photo companies now offer, is going to be a viable business model in a couple of years.
We will all be able to use (for example) “LLM Helvetica Free” without any license.
You inspired me to attempt this and sadly GPT, Claude, and Gemini all said they didn’t have the software tools to do it. But as you mentioned, it can generate SVGs and those can be used to create a font.
I was curious who was behind this campaign - it has a wikipedia page (answer: FACT and MPAA):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Wouldn%27t_Steal_a_Car
A popular response
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4
Very early in my design education (late 90's) I was taught that fonts are fonts and the more you have, the better you tool set would be. As a graphic designer I definitely made things with fonts I had downloaded. It wasn't till I got my first serious design job at an agency where I quickly learned about purchasing and licensing fonts. Even if I could "find" a missing font, I wasn't allowed to use it. We needed to get the fonts directly from the vendor we were working with and if they were being too slow, we ate the cost and purchased the font.
It's even harder to get away with pirating fonts now with web fonts. Either the service can detect you pulling a font for a domain that isn't paying for it or webcrawlers will find unpaid fonts.
>> Either the service can detect you pulling a font for a domain that isn't paying for it...
Is that really a thing? Markup in a web page tells how to display the text. Saying "use this font over here on this other server" seems fair game on some level. Might not be on another level, but it's technically the end user downloading a file that's publicly available on some server.
In the USA at least, contributory and vicarious infringement are a thing. Grokster knowingly directed their users to infringing material so they picked up secondary liability.
AIUI the font vendor has a list of customers, each of whom are required to provide an exact list of the domains they will host it on and the domains they will display it on. So the crawlers, upon identifying a matching font, simply have to check that both the displaying and hosting domains match.
A downloadable file can be hosted elsewhere.
"Pulling a font for a domain"—wtf, isn't the client making the request? Why detect anything, just require a referrer on your allow-list, and deny if it's not there.
An allow-list would probably suck for local development for users that do have a valid license.
The moral background for copyright is in free fall these days.
It is quickly turning into one of these things that there are laws for, and everyone thinks it is rediculous, it is never enforced and DE facto not a law.
And what a shame that is.
Copyright, and patents, are not based on moral principles. It's a temporary government license meant to encourage innovation and hustle. Whether it works or not, I don't know. But the only question of morality is if it's immoral to break an arbitrary law, or not.
This is strongly jurisdiction-dependent.
US patent and copyright derive from A1S8C8 of the US constitution, "to promote science and useful arts".
Much EU law derives from a French tradition based on droight d'auteur, or moral rights.
International copyright code (Berne Convention) rips and mashes from both traditions.
A law claiming that something is a "moral right" doesn't make it so, though.
Just as e.g. sodomy laws claiming that something is immoral doesn't make it so.
I'd agree with this.
The point I was addressing was whether or not copyright is grounded in moral rights, and as my earlier response notes, it depends on jurisdiction and foundations.
That said, I've come to a general view that moralising of pathologies or other behaviours is often highly counterproductive. Medicine progressed little when illness, disease, or dysfunction were rationalised as will of gods or divine retribution. Germ theory and other causal etiologies broke that dam. Left-handedness was widely viewed as literally malevolent, a sign of the devil. Which did little to prevent the condition, and greatly hampered opportunities and life-paths of the roughly 10% of the population which is left handed. Oppression of LGBTQIX+ individuals is often presented as a similar situation. Mental health and illness still carry strong moralising-of-pathology overtones, though the situation's improving. Justice and penal systems are presented by some as another such case (see in particular Robert Sapolsky).
Back to copyright and patent: both foundations, authorial/inventor support and moral rights strike me as grossly flawed in both grounding and consequence.
Copyright has always been based on moral principles. 'Moral rights' have been part of copyright longer than "encourage innovation and hustle" has been something the government has considered worth promoting. The original copyright laws were about controlling who could print the bible, and the statute of anne was about encouraging learning while controlling what booksellers could and couldn't do. Copyright if anything was about preventing innovation from the very beginning, and slowing the hustle of culture down so that incumbents could edge out newcomers - a drama that has played out generation after generation
>And what a shame that is.
I was with you until this. Copyright is a legal fiction, if it's no longer working the world will adapt. No need for shame to be involved.
All abstract property rights are legal fiction. The notion that you can own, say, a piece of land that you have never even came close to, simply by virtue of a record in some registry somewhere; and, based on that ownership, then restrict the ability of others who actually do live next to it to enter it or otherwise use it, is rather absurd from a "natural right" perspective.
I should note that this isn't even some kind of hot new take. Here's what Thomas Jefferson had to say on the subject:
"It is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all... It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society."
"A right of property in moveable things is admitted before the establishment of government. A separate property in lands, not till after that establishment. The right to moveables is acknowledged by all the hordes of Indians surrounding us. Yet by no one of them has a separate property in lands been yielded to individuals. He who plants a field keeps possession till he has gathered the produce, after which one has as good a right as another to occupy it. Government must be established and laws provided, before lands can be separately appropriated, and their owner protected in his possession. Till then, the property is in the body of the nation, and they, or their chief as trustee, must grant them to individuals, and determine the conditions of the grant."
All law is a fiction, by that argument.
Just because it’s a fiction doesn’t meant it’s not effective in triggering human responses and proactive actions. In a broad sense, fiction is all we get as human minds, whether it’s representative representation of our actual embedding universe or not.
That would in fact be part of my argument.
Some fictions are readily dispensible. Most are not.
What they are not however is laws of nature, divine right or revelation, or immutable.
Limit on the law-of-nature bit: law is often a highly probable outcome of various power dynamics, political, economic, social, cultural, etc.
>All law is a fiction, by that argument.
sure but some can claim more of a moral basis than others.
Beware claims to moral rights / superiority. They're often a thought-stopping wedge to badness.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43782745>
Copyright in the sense of corporate greed is indeed an issue.
Whenever talk about that being a shame, I am thinking about the individual author who lost control over their work and still can not feed themselves.
Piracy is not the reason individual authors cannot feed themselves.
It's worth noting that the moral background (at least in terms of political philosophy in the US) was always rooted in practicalities. The Constitution even includes the qualifier "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." The moment a protection works against those goals, it's on shaky ground. And that ground is always in flux; there's a reason Thomas Jefferson noted regarding patents that "other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrasment than advantage to society."
This is why copyright is shot-through with exceptions (for example, we give broad leeway to infringement for educational purposes, for what benefit does society gain if protection of the intellectual property of this generation stunts the growth of creative faculties of the next?). And that's usually fine, until, say, a broadly-exceptioned process to gather and catalog art and expression worldwide available online that was fed into neural net training in academic settings for decades becomes something of a different moral quality when the only thing that's changed is instead of a grey-bearded professor overseeing the machine it's a grey-templed billionaire financier.
(I submit to the Grand Council of People Reading This Thread the possibility that one resolution to this apparent paradox is to consider that the actual moral stance is "It's not fair that someone might starve after working hard on a product of the mind while others benefit from their hard work," and that perhaps copyright is simply not the best tool to address that moral concern).
I don't have objections to the tool. My issues are with how much power we have assigned to that tool.
The right to claim renumeration for, and restrict use of, one's work should not IMO extend for multiple generations. I'm not sure it should even extend for one.
Blame the current wave of rentier capitalism. Pioneered by SaaS. The funds like the one behind this site played a role in the acceleration.
I would, and I have.
It's fresh takes like this that keep me coming back to HN, year after year.
I mean how many articles do we have a week where the AI vendors are copying the entire internet and using it for training.
There is a significant portion of the internet that is perfectly fine with copying every bit of digital data and using it as their own.
Like, the actual lead type?
What happens if you present an image of a page in some font to an LLM, and ask it to make you a font file for that font? An LLM could probably not only do that, but create matching characters for ones not already present.
Oh, and tell it to fix the kerning.
As a matter of US law:
- Font letterforms are not copyrightable. (Eltra Corp. v. Ringer, 579 F.2d 294 (4th Cir. 1978) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eltra_Corp._v._Ringer>)
- Font programmes are. (Generally 1980 Computer Software Copyright Act.)
- Cleanroom reimplementation of software is not copyright infringement. An AI without access to original source code would likely pass this test.
- As a further twist, it appears likely that courts will hold that AI creations are themselves not copyrightable (original works of authorship), such that the product of any such project would itself be public domain. (See: <https://www.reuters.com/legal/ai-generated-art-cannot-receiv...>.)
The whole scenario appears to open the door to liberation of all fonts for which public letterforms are available. This would be an "AI hole" (analogous to the ... analogue hole) for escaping copyright. Whether this liberation would occur before foundries passed new protective legislation will be an interesting question.
Right.
A good question to work on is whether an LLM, given a reasonable number of characters of a font, can generate letter forms for the entire Unicode character space. Probably. It's a style matching problem, and LLMs are good at that.
That would be interesting to see. An a possible way of extending current typefaces through the Unicode glyph-space.
Thought I'd had earlier: there's a lot of detail that goes into font design, particularly anticipating issues with specific media.
E.g., faces meant for wet-ink print often incorporates features to avoid pooling or smearing ink ("ink traps", see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ink_trap>). Electrostatic printing (a/k/a laserprinters), and screen-based displays (CRT, LED, Plasma, eInk) also have idiosyncrasies which fine-detail font design may take into account.
I'm not sure those would be hugely significant, but seem a domain in which a naive AI font designer might prove deficient.
This comment section is precisely what I expected upon discovering this very funny anecdote regarding the irony and hypocrisy involved with the infamous anti-piracy advocacy of the late '90's/early '00s. Peak HN--didactic, humorless, and lost in its own takes about the absolute least relevant detail of the story: font licensing.
This sounds very critical, but I assure you, these are my people. I rather find it very reassuring, even a little charming.
Don't ever change HN.
I'm also enjoying the conversation, but IMO font licensing is core to whether or not there is actual irony and hypocrisy at play (specifically the copyright aspect, and whether or not the font clone actually infringed copyright).
Looks like the wikipedia page needs a bit of updating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Wouldn%27t_Steal_a_Car
>Powered by Iceshrimp
Sort of off-topic, but interesting engine, which I never heard about (wasn't ever mentioned on HN either: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Iceshrimp):
>Iceshrimp is a decentralized and federated social networking service, implementing the ActivityPub standard.
https://iceshrimp.dev/iceshrimp/iceshrimp.net
Iceshrimp, or at least this JavaScript version of it, is a fork of Misskey, which has been mentioned on HN a few times. If you've heard of Mastodon, Misskey and its forks participate in the same decentralized social network - Mastodon users can like and comment on the tweet-like posts that a Misskey user makes and vice-versa.
The Iceshrimp devs are also working on a "port" to .NET that's basically a brand new social media app, but with an upgrade path from the JavaScript version.
I also use Iceshrimp to self-host my own fediverse account and I think it's pretty good software. I think it has a better UI that Mastodon and it has some cutesy features that Mastodon lacks, like being able to emoji-react to posts.
What about stealing code from github, images from deviantart and pinterest, knowledge base from stackoverflow, etc, to train AI?
Having worked in the graphic design industry during the 90's, no. There's no way I'd have just slipped a font I didn't own on a disk and sent it off to a printer. When it comes to fonts for coding... sure there was that ONE time I snagged Operator Mono for an extended "trial". I still believe in paying for things that I use on a daily basis, so I switched back to Sauce Code Pro or something.
If you've seen a bunch of memes on 4chan and 8chan with TEFF Renard, Trinite, and/or Lexicon fonts, that was me.
Can someone explain to me how you determine if a font is ripped/stolen?
I was under the impression that fonts are just a collection of line arc/points.
So is this a probabilistic comparison in that, if all of the line arc/points match another font - the chances are high it was ripped?
In this case, per the link:
> went sleuthing and quickly found a PDF from the campaign site with the font embedded
So, the PDF had the font Xband Rough embedded inside of it.
But was Xband created by copying the math from FF Confidential?
PDF is a famously (and hilariously) wild document format because it satisfied the need of being able to recreate a work piece faithfully using thousands of kinds of outputs, some of which didn't even exist when the document was created, to ideally arbitrary pixel resolution (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbCniw-BcW0 for a delightful and informative talk including this topic).
As a result, in one of the modes of PDF you can save the entire font file for every font used by the PDF into the PDF itself, just in case it's not present on the recipient's machine. Costly? Sure! But what else are you going to do if your document uses a super-special font for displaying mathematical symbols or sanskrit or the glyphs of a language understood by fifty people on the planet and Unicode isn't widely adopted yet, having been invented just two years before PDF?
So in this case, the author grabbed a copy of a PDF version of the ad (because those ads are still available online), cracked open the document itself, and found the glyphs for the letters are sourced from a version of the font that was intentionally created to steal someone else's font work because the whole font file is in the document.
>Sure! But what else are you going to do if your document uses a super-special font for displaying mathematical symbols or sanskrit or the glyphs of a language understood by fifty people on the planet and Unicode isn't widely adopted yet, having been invented just two years before PDF?
Assuming it's for print/display and not future editing, I imagine you could convert the font strokes to vectors or similar.
In fact many PDFs still do convert the text to shapes rather than use the font. It does cause problems when you need to copy text out though
You could. But in a thousand page document, that's a lot of memory used up to record a vector for every letter 'c'. So of course you do two layers: record modifiers and transforms on a canonical 'c', and then keep a canonical 'c' somewhere with all the other letters.
... But you already have that data structure: it's the font file itself.
(Possibly worth noting here also is that historically, Adobe owned both the PDF format and the file format for most popular fonts. So they were heavily incentivized to just reuse code they already owned here instead of reinventing a wheel).
> that's a lot of memory used up to record a vector for every letter 'c'.
only if you do things in the dumbest way possible.
Typefaces are not copyrightable but fonts are off, using a font with a knockoff typeface is not copyright infringement because it is not using the copyrighted font.
But... fonts aren't copyrightable. Was this a patented font?
An AI font generatooorrrr!! (whoop whoop horn sound effect:)
https://www.calligrapher.ai/
here is a font stealing search query if anyone is interested. I used to have it as a custom search engine on chrome:
URL with %s in place of query: https://www.google.com/search?q=intitle%3A%22index.of%22+(tt...
Bought the Adobe Font Folio -- TWICE.
Now, every single font in the font folio is free with a $30./month Adobe sub.
> ...every single font in the font folio is free with a $30./month Adobe sub.
That's an interesting definition of "free," but it's relevant that the subscription doesn't grant a perpetual license.
The concept of "piracy" and copyright is completely ridiculous. Real piracy involves stealing, destroying and killing, not copying numbers.
I never entered in a contract with you, producer of goods or innovation, you have no right to forbid me from copying anything.
You may prevent your own customers from facilitating access of non paying customers to their goods (by making them sign a contract) and even persecute them in a civil court (for breach of contract).
The fact that governments allow copyright owners to censor information on the internet to protect their commercial interest is just absolutely insane and incredibly damaging to the freedom of circulation of culture and ideas.
Wife works in corp. legal. Just had to settle a demand for font licenses that the company front end used without approval. $40k.
Its a good gimmick if you can get it.
Off-topic, but with this ad I always think of the IT Crowd spoof
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg
Relevant:
You wouldn't download a car
>https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/piracy-its-a-crime
Also be aware that some people actually consider the real PSA to be a Mandela effect since they consider "You wouldn't download a car" to be the "real, original" text of these PSAs, while in reality this was a popular parody/meme that was made out of the PSA:
> https://www.reddit.com/r/MandelaEffect/comments/113qibd/you_...
I am not registered with this private instance, but there is a comment that I want to reply to:
> This is so typical of people who are just doing a hatchet job for money but have no personal interest in the topic or skin in the game.
This is both true and incomplete. Advocates against piracy are time and again caught infringing on IP. I think about when Lily Allen stole the content of her anti-piracy screed "It's Not Alright" from Techdirt[0]:
> However, [...] the rest of the blog post – put there by Lilly herself – is someone else’s work. Arrr mateys, Long John Allen lifted the entire post from another site – Techdirt.com – effectively pirating the work of the one and only Mike Masnick.
> “I think it’s wonderful that Lilly Allen found so much value in our Techdirt post that she decided to copy — or should I say ‘pirate’? — the entire post,” Mike told TorrentFreak on hearing the shocking news.
The anti-piracy creators demand that we stay within their narrow definition of "piracy", which just so happens to exclude the work that they steal. Yes, the creative agency behind the "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" ad are disconnected from the cause. And their clients at the MPAA and FACT do not consider fonts to be worthy of the protections that are ostensibly the basis of their existence.
0: https://torrentfreak.com/file-sharing-heroine-lilly-allen-is...
I definitely would
There was a nice video on how you can't copyright a typeface recently by "Ok, so" over on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J06tluN7rtE
But you can copyright a font name, so if someone copies your work and releases it under a new name... that's that's like creating a copy of the car piece by piece and giving it your own name.
So they were right: we not downloading a car, we never were. We were all just making copies.
fonts.google.com has 1816 different font families that are all open-source. So no, I wouldn't steal a font when there's so many available for free.
There are many movies available for free
Some of them even use those free fonts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ
Edit: OK, the original post is extremely unclear.
To clarify: the original font is named "FF Confidential" (which the post doesn't even mention).
The seemingly illegal clone is called "XBAND Rough".
copying the visual is legal, copying the file is not — in this case it seems the clone is of the file AND therefore the appearance
"Entity that conducts IP theft whines about IP theft"... just like OpenAI whining about Deepseek distillation...
Remember kids: information wants to be free!
I don’t think that’s productive. Best case response that I can imagine is piracy opponents pushing for some legislation mandating fonts with DRM.
Air quotes - “it’s obviously the fault of the person who cloned the font and the general public needs to be protected against such content” - end air quotes.
At the same time, it doesn’t have to be productive, it’s funny enough.