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Comment by 23B1 | Hacker News Reader

Considering the amount of work it takes to build a font – the amount of mind-numbing care, testing, iterating, crafting... please do not steal fonts. There's no big bad studios or MPAA between these typographers and the world taking the bulk of their money, and they barely scrape by as it is.

Pirate all the lame movies you want, but please, if nothing else, pay typographers and buy direct from their foundries.

If any brave souls are interested in legally pirating all existing fonts and being taken there, I think you’d likely be doing a service to society here in challenging this.

The service to society is already being done by the typographers. The service you can do to society is to pay them for their passion, precision, and care.

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The author agrees with you. They're saying that the lack of legal protection for fonts is a problem, and that creating an opportunity to challenge that law would be a good thing.

Courts can only weigh in on legal issues when people bring a dispute before the court. In this case, if someone did what the author describes it would trigger a lawsuit from typographers, which would give the court a chance to (re)interpret or overturn the existing law.

I think the vast majority of typefaces can’t really have legal protection from a creative stand point because they’re so close to each other that it’s incredibly hard to argue that they’re original content.

Just compare Inter vs Roboto vs San Francisco. Are they different? Technically yes. Are they different enough to allow for all three to be granted legal protection? I’d say no. And if you say yes, then it comes down to how different is different enough and the entire field becomes a legal nightmare

"That Picasso looks like that Braque, so neither deserves protection"

The question is, essentially, "should bitmap fonts be copyrightable". In many jurisdictions, they are not. In the US, this has been black-letter law for several decades. A purely mechanical image reproduction of a typeface does not enjoy legal protection. I think it should remain that way. Many fonts are extremely similar, and allowing rights to the design itself would result in fights over the most basic of typeface design, similar to that seen in the music industry (where there have been efforts to claim rights to a chord progression).

Outline fonts (that contain programmable elements) are considered software and are copyrightable. A rendered output of such a font is not. It may legally matter who makes that rendered output, that they have the right to use the font software in that fashion. But someone working from a specimen? They should have the right to digitize that font themselves, and employ creative decision-making in placing the control points. In fact, that very thing has happened numerous times within the typography industry.

No. The given the author's background, this is (admittedly) clever technical thinking done under the guise of making a legal/political statement. Plenty of other ways to solve this problem besides fake 'good intentions' slacktivism.

> There's no big bad studios or MPAA between these typographers and the world taking the bulk of their money

Where do fonts come from? Monotype, mostly https://thehustle.co/where-do-fonts-come-from/

Cool – use AI to build a free service that competes with Monotype.

> Pirate all the lame movies you want, but please, if nothing else, pay typographers and buy direct from their foundries.

I agree in spirit, but as I wrote on my blog months ago, I just refuse to engage with an industry that had decided to adopt some of the worst licenses possible to sell their products.

Until foundries start adopting sensible licenses for webfonts I’ll just refuse to give money to them.

What have you done to fix it besides not stealing fonts and writing a blog?

You're using slacktivism as cover for bad behavior. I'm not saying that IP laws aren't f'd up and wrong. They absolutely are.

But two wrongs don't make a right, and it's the same nonsense that folks have been making since the beginning of the internet to justify what amounts to petty theft.

What have I done?

I paid for fonts when people have sane licenses to support good behavior.

I also support and use open source typefaces.

What else am I supposed to do? Pay a goddamn typeface more money than I make working full time in a month?

Apologies, I totally misread this bit of your comment:

> Until foundries start adopting sensible licenses for webfonts I’ll just refuse to give money to them.

Yeah of course you shouldn't feel obligated to pay for what you don't want. I assumed it meant you'd just 'steal' it if you didn't like the license.

I'd never steal a font considering there are countless free, open source alternatives out there. But I also refuse to pay an insane amount of money to type foundries because they decided that "page views" are a reasonable indicator of how much value I'm getting for a typeface.

I worked on websites where the cost of a license for the font was 70% of the total budget available for the entire project. That makes no sense to me. I love great typography. I love great typefaces. But a typeface is not all that important in the grand scheme of things. I can change a typeface on literally every single one of the hundreds of websites I worked on in my career and I bet 95% of the users would not notice it nor care cabout it.

We are all colletively getting pissed super quickly when software goes subscription but we're fine when someone is selling me a typeface that comes with 50000 page views and once those are "used" I have to pay again. For a goddamn file I self host myself.

It's just bonkers.

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