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Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

How come these old typefaces like Helvetica and Gill Sans not in the public domain? The article mentions Helvetica being rolled in with one of Monotype’s purchases yet Helvetica is from the 1940s?

Hard copies of Shakespeare have individual copyright because of their unique prefaces. Are these typefaces in copyright still because of the individual numerical descriptions being the work under protection, rather than the actual shape?

Is it something similar to How X’s recording of Bach’s Y concerto with The Z Ensemble is in copyright, but the musical score itself is in the public domain?

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It looks like[0] as of the start of this year, only works made in 1927 or earlier are in the public domain. Copyright terms have regularly been extended by Congress and they are astoundingly long now.

[0]https://copyrightlately.com/public-domain-day-2023/

Also known as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

Thanks to Disney, this aspect of our economy and culture is completely broken.

> Copyright terms have regularly been extended by Congress and they are astoundingly long now.

There has been no appetite for extending terms in recent years, and things are entering the public domain again, including _Steamboat Willie_. I think there is an understanding that the CTEA will end up as the final extension and that further extensions are unlikely.

I have a suspicion that this is why steamboat willy has been in the Disney intro for the last few years - so it can be a trademark (which don't have expiry dates)

They extended it to be in line with the Berne Convention of Europe. It won't happen as easily again because there is no precedent for longer terms.

Cher gets a good chunk of the blame too

Sonny gets blame for the copyright extension act, but Cher's royalties lawsuit is not unreasonable or copying rights related... or did I misunderstand or miss something?

Because you're not buying Helvetica, but a digital variant of it. It's like a performance of classical music. Also Helvetica specifically is from 1957, so it may not in the public domain yet (depending on location).

There are actually several variants all named Helvetica, which is why it's a really bad font to put into your CSS font stack if you're not delivering it yourself. Newer variants tend to use other names (e.g. Neue Haas Grotesk).

The font files themselves are copyrighted. The underlying typeface --- the shapes of the letters themselves --- are not, so you could I suppose draw your own Helvetica. But you wouldn't be able to call it "Helvetica", because that's a trademark.

I've still never entirely understood why nobody's written a program to rasterize paid fonts at 10000 dpi and then run the bitmap through an automatic vectorization tool to create a legally free and redistributable version that is visually indistinguishable from the original (literally off by rounding errors).

The only thing missing would be hinting, but on retina displays and modern laser printers that's much less important than it used to be -- and you can always implement automatic hinting. And it's easy to extract kerning pairs as well.

I'm not saying this would be good for font creators or society. I'm just wondering why it hasn't become a common thing, when it doesn't seem like it's actually illegal.

Just a guess here:

(1) It's a lot of work.

(2) You'd get sued anyways and then have to explain to a jury the distinction between your vectorized raster and the original vectors --- I agree that a graphical interpretation of, effectively, a photograph of a curve is not the same thing as that curve, but it's a subtle point.

(3) Most importantly: it just doesn't matter enough. Universally "important" fonts (Helvetica, say) have widely-used liberally-licensed alternatives, but if you want Hoefler Whitney, you want the real Hoefler Whitney, for the same non-pragmatic reason that you'd want a real pair of D&G Daymasters.

Optifonts was doing something similar to that in the 90s. The results were generally mediocre to bad, but they were going for volume. I've used them in print for headlines and decorative fonts because you can adjust them manually until it looks pretty good. Both the backstory and the fonts are pretty interesting:

http://abfonts.freehostia.com/opti/

http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-27506.html

Thanks! That's exactly what I thought someone would have started a business to do. Glad to know it was actually tried.

If the results were bad then, I can't help but think they'd be far better now. I have to assume automatic vectorization is now much improved since the 90's.

Font's aren't quite just a collection of images. Though they almost are which makes it hard to see the boundaries.

But a computer font (as opposed to the typeface it represents) is a specialized program, ie it has logic as well as data. Specifically, kerning tables and the conditions under which to use ligatures would be lost by the approach you're proposing. But I'm not a typographer or font expert and I suspect other things also. Anyway that doesn't make it completely untenable, just not a complete & automatic process.

It is similar in concept to how recipes are handled by intellectual property law. A list of ingredients isn't protected, nor is a specific result. But a list plus instructions is. You can copy a recipe by applying a different set of instructions to the same list of ingredients, resulting in an identical dish. In this the type characters are the ingredients, but you still need to provide a set of instructions to combine them into a font. You can provide ones that create an identical result, but you can't simply copy them from the original font.

I agree that you're not going to use this approach to make a clone of Zapfino, for example.

But for 99% of fonts it's going to work fine. Kerning tables should be easy to recreate simply by rendering all pairs of characters and measuring the resulting width. And there are only a handful of common ligatures (ff, fi, etc.).

But absolutely, there's a small percentage of fonts with more advanced features that would be harder/prohibitive to reproduce this way.

Excluding font designs from copyright protection is a USA-specific thing. What you describe might be restricted by IP laws in other jurisdictions so doing it commercially could be dicey.

Sure, but doing it commercially in the USA would be the point. Although IP laws are awfully aligned internationally by this point -- I wonder if there are differences in protections for typefaces?

IANAL, but this is what design patents are for. They’re much shorter though - 15 years it looks like for fonts [0].

[0]: https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/my-word-design-patents-on-...

To specify about your Shakespeare example, the hard copies are most definitely not under copyright as a whole. At least in the US, only the new, copyrightable material in them can be copyrighted. If it is not novel enough to be copyrightable on its own (like page numbers, titles, etc), it can't be copyrighted.

Frankly there are a lot of things that people and companies claim copyright on, and other people pay them for, that are not legally under copyright at all. But it is survival of the richest out there...

Eric Gill is another of those situations where you need to separate the art from the artist: https://amp.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/apr/09/eric-gi...

That last bit is my understanding: the typefaces are public domain, but the font files that describe them are protected.

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