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Comment by philipwhiuk | Hacker News Reader

> To train the model, I assembled a dataset of 71k distinct fonts.

I give it a week before Monotype sues your face off.

Wikipedia says: "In the United States, the shapes of typefaces are not eligible for copyright but may be protected by design patent (although it is rarely applied for, the first US design patent that was ever awarded was for a typeface).[1]"

So just scanning the rendered font (as opposed to the code that generates it), may be harder to stop than scanning of artwork.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...

The interesting thing about law is that even if the law doesn't absolutely protect you; the person that you believe infringing on your work for free had better be prepared to pony up lawyer fees to defend their work.

I think this would be one of the few times where I think that's useful. Typefaces take a lot of time and consideration and work to create so just blanket ripping off that work because we all take them for granted is kind of bullshit.

I have conflicting thoughts about this.

But at the end of the day if you only trained on open fonts they just aren't generally as good and the output should be not generally as good as opposed to training on nicer fonts that you technically don't have the rights to (but no one thoughts of this being an issue at the time of design patents / etc ).

But we're now in the world where we will pay money to compute an AI model to design fonts instead of just paying designers to design fonts. The race to the bottom is accelerating at an alarming rate.

> may be harder to stop than scanning of artwork.

Which has not been particularly easy to stop either

General question. What is the end game of all this? Corporations that have the money and other means are just wildly burning electricity while sucking up the world's art and knowledge work.

How can anyone possibly protect their work in this no holds barred environment?

Font law is almost as complex and fascinating as Tree law. Given how complex font licensing can be, a generative use case that produces usable fonts would be a huge threat to the foundaries and I expect they will be very litigious, just as Getty and others are in the image space.

Tree law? Please say more, sounds interesting

possibly this? https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/tree-law-is-a-gnarly-t...

....“It’s never about the trees,” Bonapart says. “The trees often serve as lightning rods for other issues that are the psychological underpinning of a dispute that people might have with each other.”

Funny - literally doing with this right now - a tree that crosses my boundary with a neighbor dropped a branch on another neighbor's house.

That's why it's so important for the weights to be released to the public ASAP. Even when the original is sued, they can still be passed around in torrents for hobbyists and third-world businessmen to enjoy.

Not this agin /eyeroll

It’s not illegal for a human to look through 71,000 fonts and then creat their own. It can’t be illegal for a human to use a robot to look through the fonts for them.

> it can't be...

Oh boy it totally can. I'm not saying it it, but it totally can.

I feel many people (at least on HN) treat laws like programming. There are some similarities, but programmers like to eliminate arbitrary special cases, while lawmakers love to create arbitrary special cases. It's like their only job, really.

Programming and law can go together tho https://github.com/CatalaLang/catala

In fact, that failure to grok lawmakers, lies at the heart of many poor decisions made.

It depends on exactly what is learned from looking through them. If you end up copying shapes and segments then there are possible grounds for a lawsuit. If you’re able to determine the rules to make a good font from your analysis, however, then nothing is stopping you from applying them.

Yeah but honestly how much diversity does a font have? You say copying shapes and segments etc, but if you look at a genre of fonts, say scifi ones, they all have very similar features, usually with one big "character" difference (sometimes barely even that).

How is it possible to create something 100% unique when it's meant to fill a particular genre? The genre exists because it's a group of similar things.

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