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Comment by oldstrangers | Hacker News Reader

The silliest thing I learned years ago was that the license only applies to the "software" of the font. In the US, you can literally go and vectorize any font in the world and do whatever you want with it.

"In the United States, the shapes of typefaces are not eligible for copyright, though the shapes may be protected by design patent (although these are rarely applied for, the first US design patent ever awarded was for a typeface)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...

Also from somebodynew: "A US federal court held that typeface designs cannot be copyrighted in Eltra Corp. v. Ringer in 1978. Federal regulations made this explicit in 37 CFR 202.1(e) in 1992. The government's explanation here [1] makes it explicit that typefaces are not subject to copyright protection, while fonts can be copyrighted as computer software." [1] https://cdn.loc.gov/copyright/history/mls/ML-393.pdf

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IANAIPL but IAAL and I'm skeptical of this, at least in the U.S. There's nothing in title 17 AFAIK that explicitly allows this, and it is quite different from how copyright works for all other categories of works.

I'd be interested in a citation if you have one.

Do you think you could vectorize all the pages in a book and magically get around the copyright?

EDIT: Thank you for providing the citation. Interesting! I'm not sure I agree with the court's analysis in ELTRA Corp., but the codification in the CFR obviates any difference of opinion on the matter.

"Do you think you could vectorize all the pages in a book and magically get around the copyright?"

...what?

The specific shapes and style of a font are not protected under copyright. It's only the software.

"A US federal court held that typeface designs cannot be copyrighted in Eltra Corp. v. Ringer in 1978. Federal regulations made this explicit in 37 CFR 202.1(e) in 1992. The government's explanation here [1] makes it explicit that typefaces are not subject to copyright protection, while fonts can be copyrighted as computer software." [1] https://cdn.loc.gov/copyright/history/mls/ML-393.pdf

OK so you vectorize some commercial font then release it for free. Haven't you essentially just recreated the software, which is copyrighted? Haven't you still violated copyright just with extra steps?

It seems like a distinction without a difference.

Usually people don't just vectorize the font and rerelease it without any modifications. Usually there's some small stylistic changes made, which most people wouldn't notice, but type designers are attuned to. So then it's a substantive change.

I think this is the logic behind the legal decision: that the glyphs put constraints on things enough that it would be difficult to navigate legally in many cases.

You can't create a usable font using vectors. Just not how it works. You could vectorize a brand name in a font of your choice without repercussion though.

And yes, people make 'clones' of fonts all the time that are ever so slightly different (Arial).

Apart from the glyphs (the character shapes) there's also the unique kerning data, ligatures/sequences of characters that produce other outputs, hinting data (for monitor displays) and such.

My understanding is that book publishers didn’t want the headache of knowing which printers were licensed for specific fonts, so they got a specific carveout for the shape of letters. So when they sell a book, they don’t have to worry about whether the printing company was licensed to resell the books they printed for the publisher.

The “you can have a copyright on the font software” aspect seems to be based on the idea that a particular font file is just as copyrightable as, say, a computer file of a company’s employee handbook describing uncopyrightable methods and systems ( https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf ).

If I pay Microsoft for a cool font, I don’t have to pay extra to print and distribute documents using it, but I can’t email the font file to my friends without paying Microsoft more. It’s not clear to me how that interacts with fonts embedded in PDF files, but I believe some companies charge more to license fonts so they can be embedded in PDFs. As far as creating a font file based on the physical shape if letters: you would end up with a file similar to the original, but I doubt it would be bit-for-bit identical. So you would have a reasonable explanation of how you got the similar file without violating anybody’s copyright.

> Do you think you could vectorize all the pages in a book and magically get around the copyright?

No, because the text content is what is copyrighted, not the physical structure of the words on the page.

This was one of the motivations for ITC's founding decades ago (as per my recollection of one of Herb Lubalin's old U&lc magazine pieces) since font reproductions under different names was rampant as it was increasingly easier to reproduce (albeit most of the time with some artifacts*) and since they wanted to encourage typeface designers to still create new typefaces and pay them decently.

* I distinctly remember ads in the magazine highlighting the 'authentic' fonts vs the artifacts of reproduced imitations. This was before digitization made it even more trivial. I should mention scans of these old U&lc magazines were made available in PDF form several years ago and are well worth reading (particularly the earliest issues Lubalin was involved with before his passing).

This may be true but you are discounting how hard it is to create your own font from scratch. If one could do it, they probably wouldn't be in the market for a font license in the first place. The vast majority of website builders want/need a 1-click solution.

Kinda like saying hey, every SaaS service out there can legally be rebuilt in-house with the same look and behavior, so why pay for any of them?

I'm not arguing for creating your own font. I'm just expressing how silly the law is. Of all the things I thought a copyright law would protect, I'd assume it would be the actual artistic visualization of a font, and not the software that it runs on.

I might be wrong but I think the issue is that there are typeface extremely similar to each other and so it would be hard to figure out when something is actually a new design.

Arial/Helvetica is the classic example.

Personally, I wouldn’t even know how to approach this issue from a legal standpoint.

Seems to me like it wouldn't be that difficult to automate vectorizing whatever ttf.

But fonts are more than just typeface vectors. For example, it's code can cause any conceivable string of characters to look different than simply rendering each glyph immediately next to each other; sometimes it's kerning tweaks, sometimes combinations get replaced with completely different glyphs (like "f" and "i" next to each other often having an undotted "i": look closely at "fi" depending on the font).

Not really, it depends on license agreement. For example today I integrated just another font to a customer’s website and license agreements had paragraphs about suing in case of attempts to copy/modify or any other way meddling with the font or its visual representation.

Obviously, you still can make a copy of any font and change it a little, but you can be sued for this.

Yes, copying or modifying the actual software.

You're free to transform the shape and style of a vectorized font as much as you want.

It depends where you live. In the U.S it seems that typefaces can't have copyright protection, the font file ITSELF has copyright protection because it's a "computer program" for generating a typeface. In theory in the U.S you can take a typeface, create your own font file and use it as you see fit. Of course you might run into trouble and prove that you created your own font file. Other countries like Germany it seems DO give protection to typefaces so you can't just copy a typeface exactly.

I've read something along this lines before, but cannot find a good source for it. Do you have one?

Basically fonts are copyrightable but typefaces are not. Font names are also trademarkable. https://glarts.org/font-and-typeface-legal-tip-sheet/

If that holds up in court, why aren't there free/open source/cheaper versions of typefaces that look just like some font but are named differently?

There are. (With the caveat of look the same as some typeface. Not all the kerning and so forth may be identical.) Overpass is one example I'm familiar with off the top of my head but there are many. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpass_(typeface) Arial, notably, is also similar to (though distinguishable from with some letterforms) Helvetica.

There are: for quite a famous example see Monotype's Arial which is effectively free for Windows/Office users and is mostly indistinguishable from Helvetica by people who are not typography experts.

Most free clones are not as good in various ways, and good clones that are charged for probably get earn their creators a letter from a foundry's legal team that makes them decide that the cost (time and money) of defending their position (even though they should eventually win) is not worth it.

This sounds like a typeface is not copyrightable but only because the mechanism for protection is different (patent system). So by doing what the GP suggests you wouldn't be violating copyright, but you may be in violation of the design patent on the typeface?

I'm not sure how common design patents are though. Relative to copyright, patents are much shorter duration and much more expensive and time-consuming to get whereas copyrights just happen (though you may want to register for greater protection--but that's still cheap and easy.

Yeah, agreed that it seems unlikely to be a problem for most typefaces. I just think it's a bit misleading to suggest it's guaranteed to unburden the typeface of any and all 'intellectual property' protections ("In the US, you can literally go and vectorize any font in the world and do whatever you want with it").

And, of course, I can sue you for copying my typeface even if I'll probably lose in court and you probably don't want to spend at least 5 figures in lawyers to defend your open source typeface design.

A US federal court held that typeface designs cannot be copyrighted in Eltra Corp. v. Ringer in 1978. Federal regulations made this explicit in 37 CFR 202.1(e) in 1992. The government's explanation here [1] makes it explicit that typefaces are not subject to copyright protection, while fonts can be copyrighted as computer software.

[1] https://cdn.loc.gov/copyright/history/mls/ML-393.pdf

As far as I know it is a quirk of the US copyright system, so may not apply the same globally.

First reasonable one that came up in a quick search: https://www.crowdspring.com/blog/font-law-licensing/#:~:text...).

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