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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

And for additional information, he does not have the ability to make that restriction (in the US).

Typefaces can not be copyrighted. (The actual font file can be, but not the shape of the letters.)

This is a slightly edge case since the letters have considerably more art to them than the typical letter, but they are still letters, and he has no legal ability to restrict what people do with how they look.

If calligraphy can not be copyrighted (and it can not), then this can't be either. So his license does not have any force of law behind it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protectio...

His page mentions that he is from Hungary, and this restriction may have the force of law there, I don't know.

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Well, the actual font files themselves are copyrighted, and can be distributed under whatever license he wants. It's just the shapes that are not. So you can't take the font files, add or tweak a letter, and redistribute them. But you can go through, manually trace each letter, add or tweak some, and distribute that.

I suspect that most people who would want to create a derivative work would want to reuse the existing files. Manually re-creating a font is quite a bit of work. Finding just the right control points to get the curves perfect is tough. And no, you can't just dump the control points out of the original file; that would be creating a derivative work.

Edit to add: And actually, I believe that the copyright notice on that page is for that sample, displaying how the font is constructed. This is something that is copyrightable. The actual font file doesn't seem to have been released.

What does this mean about fonts like Helvetica? Are they typically protected by design patents? If not, could someone take a bitmap screenshot of Helvetica, product a font from it, and distribute that font?

You can trace the outlines and produce an exact or almost exact copy, and that's what Ariel actually is.

How is tracing a published work not considered copying?

I'm not a lawyer so I couldn't say. But apparently that's how it works when it comes to fonts.

Because it's letters of the alphabet, and you can't copyright them or their shape.

The small modification you make to the shape are not considered enough to give you copyright.

If it was protected by a design patent, it's expired by now (they last 14 years).

> could someone take a bitmap screenshot of Helvetica, product a font from it, and distribute that font?

Yes, and not only can they, people in fact do it. That's basically what Arial is, and there are open source versions as well.

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