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Comment by mattkevan | Hacker News Reader

Ah Monotype. Knew before reading the article it would be them. Their whole MO is buying up smaller type foundries, massively increasing the licensing fees and shaking down the previous customers. They send in auditors, demand to see traffic data and threaten fines. Happened to me twice now.

Creating type is an extremely difficult and skilled discipline and designers deserve to be compensated fairly. However Monotype’s business practices are such that I won’t approve anything but open source fonts for new projects.

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It's not Monotype but HGGC, private equity firm from Palo Alto that has bought Monotype and every other type foundry they can get their hands on. They likely have strategy to completely corner the market and then turn things up.

But as I wrote here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45973261#45977078 Besides open source fonts there still are stable high quality independent foundries that are safe to use as they would already be bought. (from comment above “Mostly swiss/european companies likes of Grilli type, Lineto, Dinamo, Klim type, Florian Karsten, Swiss typefaces… companies with often just few employees.”)

Oh my god, private equity firms are such life-sucking vampires.

Buy a great company, suck as much cash as they can before discarding the empty carcass.

I'd love to some deeper 60 minutes-like documentary about it. This perhaps might actually spark some legislation change

Doubtful. The call is coming from inside the White House.

and congress. and scotus.

owned lock and stock by billionaires

You may have heard of the 1987 Michael Douglas film "Wall Street"? Nothing has meaningfully changed since then.

Back then (even in Reagan's 1980s) the Michael Douglas character types were despised by society. Now they are emulated and mainstreamed. We are set to have more private equity than McDonalds. American Capitalism is all about capital extraction now, not value creation.

https://www.thedailyupside.com/advisor/investing-strategies/...

Is there a point to these private equity firms besides sociopathically ruining everything? Why are they allowed to exist?

The point is to make everything fungible, even you. How else will america reinvent slavery?

The point is short-term profits. The private equity firms vampirically suck a lot of money out of these companies as they ruin them, and keep the money they steal.

Arguably they shouldn't be allowed to exist: They use what seem to be loopholes in corporate law to run what are essentially embezzlement schemes. If a lone person runs an embezzlement scheme, that's possibly a felony charge. It shouldn't be a loophole that a company can do it just fine without repercussions when we know a lone individual doing it is a crime.

The two problems in why they are allowed to exist are enforcement and probably legislation. Legislation is needed to close any actual loopholes in the law and/or just explicitly say things like "Leveraged Buy Outs are illegal". Enforcement is getting courts to see this as a crime and prosecute it as such. They may be waiting for legislation before they feel confident enforcing it.

Fixing those problems is certainly easier said than done.

(ETA: Also some of this is classic Anti-Trust violations. Trusts/Monopolies are still illegal. Enforcement has been somewhat negligent in the US this century and some of these deals cross too many country borders making enforcement in general harder. In this specific case, a US private equity firm buying a Japanese company, who enforces the anti-trust issue, especially if the Japanese company was already a de facto local monopoly before joining the international one?)

They exist as a consequence of how company ownership works (i.e. that it can be bought and sold). You would need to figure out some quite specific wording to prevent this without also preventing all kinds of other kinds of transfer of company ownership.

In principle, private equity firms could be a net positive: they could take over a business that's failing or just not living up to its potential, and turn around the management of it to improve it for all concerned. They often market themselves on this concept. In practice it rarely seems to work this way, where either they fail to make any return on their investment or they basically do this kind of monopolising, short-term extortion of customers. Often both.

(Patrick Boyle has a video on them from the financial side if you want some details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfUOPDOLHvE TLDW: they often aren't a great deal for investors, either)

The thing is that tax on such businesses are too low. Same as it is happening on other areas, the negative effects to society have zero counter measurements. AI will take all work and the government will crash because lack of money? Who cares? Private Firm buys all houses in a region and force the market into a false sense of scarcity to inflate prices? What could possibly go wrong? Other companies being bought in bulks by big players to hold IPs while dismissing all employees with false pretense that they are losing money? Nothing to see here..

The fact that the cost of using gray area to hide and move money to not pay taxes has a predictable and slow movement is the best for those players.

Some really good options there. I did a deep dive a while back looking for small, independent, mostly European type foundries. There’s an incredible range of talent out there.

Will never give Monotype and the like another penny.

The problem is soon you will not even know which fonts are owned by Monotype/HGGC. For example they bought Colophon and Sharp type two famous independent foundries. When buying their fonts it still seems like they are independent.

Yeah the Sharp purchase was what got us.

Those independent companies can be eventually bought by PE and turned into more bombs, though, right?

They indeed can but licensing on fonts from most companies is perpetual. Especially from the independent traditional ones. So its possible they might be bought in future but the new owner can't change license retroactively.

Also there is very high chance they already got offer from HGGC and simply refused it, because some similar notably independent type foundries got bought recently.

What is a foundry?

Sorry. Its name for a company that designs/distributes typefaces. It is a relic from past to call it this. In the past those companies were not only designing the typefaces but also manufacturing the physical matricies that were cast from metal.

Its similar to how some people say leading to mean line height. Lead strips were used for space between lines of text.

Could it be true, the past companies, which held ownership on past products, still in a misconception about current world working, and overpricing products without considering the possible downfall?

No, type designers want their art to be used. The type industry until recently has been a fairly friendly one as only designers really cared about it.

I think it’s more likely that vulture capitalists have discovered a matket that they can ruthlessly exploit, extracting every last shred of value without giving the slightest of shits about its long term sustainability.

A company that designs fonts. In the past they cast said fonts in metal to create movable type, a foundry is a place where metal is melted and cast into various forms. A font foundry was thus a place that made the type for printing presses.

But digital don't need one. A designer can do it. But why there is a market dominance through legal license in this regard?

It's a ton of work to design a font. Any designer can do it, not any designer can do it well. It's a very small niche of overall design. That led to a few companies specializing in font design, and predictably private equity firms have been buying them out & raising prices. Customers will switch away, but this creates unexpected work to do so some might end up paying at least for a while.

You can commission a custom typeface (or a modification of an existing one from their library) and get the rights to them, so they're yours. It's expensive up front, but you own it after.

They should definitely look at moving to Public Utility and become owned by government.

Google fonts has about 2000 fonts with about 8000 total variations I believe. I pretty much refuse to believe that you can’t find the font you want there. Finding it is the hard part.

I saw multiple font discussions today. These are just variations on letters, there was some interesting stuff in the past but it’s over now. There should be no ip left, just remove all protections. The world won’t be worse off.

When I select 'Japanese' on fonts.google.com the number of fonts drops from 1901 families down to 50. Selecting 'Hiragana and Katakana' raises the number to 81.

That's still a lot of fonts, but it's not 2000. I guess designing a font for a language with 2100 different characters is probably a hassle.

I suppose you're counting the joyo kanji plus kana alphabets with diacritics. But the actual count of kanji is much higher, even if Japanese uses a relatively small number of characters for day-to-day writing.

Pretty much every native university student I met when I studied there, had passed the Kanji Kentei level 1 test. A certification of proficiency in around 6000 kanji.

Yeah nah imma call bullshit on that. Kentei 1 is notoriously difficult, only a few thousand people per year try it and the pass rate is single digits.

2100 I took from Wikipedia:

> Japanese primary and secondary school students are required to learn 2,136 jōyō kanji as of 2010.[4] The total number of kanji is well over 50,000, though this includes tens of thousands of characters only present in historical writings and never used in modern Japanese.

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

They might have passed some level of the kanken (kanji kentei) in school but it is unlikely to be level 1. The gap between level 1 and 2 is ridiculous.

A typical font contains around 7,000 characters. In everyday use, you rarely touch all of them—most situations stay comfortably within the realm of jōyō kanji. However, there are many edge cases, especially with personal names, where the required characters fall outside the jōyō set. Fonts must be prepared to handle all of these possibilities, including the less common name kanji.

> I guess designing a font for a language with 2100 different characters is probably a hassle.

The ~2000 is the official count taught in schools, but the actually "commonly" used number in literature is around ~3000. And you actually want more than that, because people's names can use weird kanji which are used nowhere else.

On the other hand, the vast majority of kanji are actually composed of a limited set of "subcharacters". For example, picking a completely random one:

    徧  ⿰彳扁

The '徧' is composed of '彳' and '扁' arranged in a horizontal pattern. Unicode even has special characters (⿰,⿱,⿶, etc.) to describe these relationships.

So this actually makes creating a CJK font somewhat easier, because you can do it semi-algorithmically. You don't have to manually draw however many thousand characters there are, but you draw those "subcharacters" and then compose them together.

Has anybody ever actually implemented an algorithmically composed kanji font? Because it seems like a hugely complicated undertaking. There are rules of thumb for how characters are composed, but getting something aesthetically pleasing out of the end result is more an art than a science. Even Korean Hangul, which is way simpler, has all sorts of funky kerning rules.

Fully algorithmically? I have no idea, as I'm not really in the fonts business.

But I'm pretty sure they're not actually redrawing every character from scratch, and are actually reusing the subcomponents (at very least for normal fonts). But how much of that is actually automated - you'd have to ask actual font designers.

Yes. Arphic, for instance, calls them radical-based fonts.

Droid Sans Fallback used this strategy during Android 1.x-2.x era. Its successor Noto Sans don't do the same.

Although many kanjis can be algorithmically composed, manual adjustment of each character's shape is still necessary for production-grade fonts. For example, if you closely compare the 彳 radical between 徧, 行, and 桁, you'll notice subtle differences in width, stroke length, angle, and margin.

For 楷書 type fonts this may be true, but you ought to know there’s more to it, don’t you?

> For 楷書 type fonts this may be true, but you ought to know there’s more to it, don’t you?

With all due respect, this is the type of comment that really makes online discourse so exhausting.

Yes, I know! Unless you put up two pages of disclaimers and footnotes there's always someone who comes out of the woodwork and "um ackshually"ies you. It was only supposed to be a quick and dirty comment talking about the topic in general, and not an in-depth, ten page treatise on the subject.

If you have something to add to what I wrote, then please do so, but heckling random people who put up their comment up in good faith is not helping anyone.

Out of those, only Morisawa's BIZ UD, Sandoll's IBM Plex and Adobe's Noto families are of outstanding quality.

Motoya is also a reputable foundry. FONTDASU also, I guess. And Google's Zen.

But those are all text faces! The only display families are a few freebies from Fontworks which do not cover a lot of design range.

So, yes, hardly 2000.

mchusma - the article specifically mentioned that this is about Japanese fonts, and being able to use fonts which look the same as they used to, in the games in question. And that getting other fonts is a) time consuming, b) needs testing, c), and if they look different they're talking about having to re-brand the whole game(s) in question. A big PITA, in any case. They're aware that it's possible to find an alternative, it's just that this is not easy to do quickly, and quickly enough to avoid the $20k penalty.

> These are just variations on letters, there was some interesting stuff in the past but it’s over now.

I'm normally the last person to defend up, but there's some interesting stuff going on with svg fonts. I'm pretty sure there's only one or two true monoline fonts for instance.

Also high quality ligature support is still not that common.

The exact thing happened to us, too. Bought a font from a small foundry which then got acquired by Monotype two years down the road.

They started questioning us and assumed we had pirated the font. Send them the old receipt and told them politely to fuck off.

Never heard of them again luckily.

Is there any legal obligation to send them the old receipt? I’d be tempted to just let them waste their time on it more.

Not sure, probably depends on how resilient your company and staff is. :-D

Marketing got very nervous though and wouldn't calm down, so I sent the receipt.

First place I worked at where we got audited, Monotype presented us with a bill in the high six figures. It came as a surprise as the entire product and tech team had turned over at least three times since it was set up and no-one knew anything about it.

It turned out we had got licences, but not for anywhere near the billions of pageviews we were putting through.

We quickly switched the fonts to open source analogues and got the legal team involved. The final bill was much less than their opening bid but still a lot. It would have been much more expensive if we hadn’t had the resources to negotiate.

Apparently they are planning to create their own machine learning model with all the font data they have gathered.

> Creating type is an extremely difficult and skilled discipline and designers deserve to be compensated fairly.

Sure, if you need a custom font, you can pay someone to create it.

Once it exists, the creator has already been compensated fairly.

Why is it difficult?

What a wild take. Might as well ask why anyone should pay for anything once it's been made.

While it's possible to commission a custom font and many companies do eg. Apple, IBM, Airbnb, Bytedance, Vercel, Github, Mozilla etc. Some even make them open source. However it's not really a viable option for anyone other than the largest organisations as it's far more expensive and time-consuming than just getting a licence unless your scale is such that a commission would be cheaper.

> Might as well ask why anyone should pay for anything once it's been made.

Nothing wild about it. That's simply the reality of intellectual work. Only the first copy need ever be paid for. That is the true cost of creation. The cost of all subsequent copies is approximately $0 with 21st century computer technology.

All intellectual work is information. All information is bits. All sequences of bits are numbers. All numbers already exist in the abstract world of mathematics. We merely find them. A 20 kiB picture is just a number with 49,321 decimal digits. Creating that picture is just a process that somehow finds the right digits.

We humans are merely interesting number generators. We are anti-RNGs. Once the number has been generated, copying it is trivial.

Intellectual property exists to establish artificial scarcity. It's not real, it's completely made up and of questionable effectiveness.

Payment only ever makes sense before creation. People should be paid for their labor before they create, not for copies of the end result. Selling copies makes no economic sense.

Approximately no one would pay for the cost of any digital works in this model. A musician may take six months to compose a song. No one would pay 6 months salary for a song. This obviously leads to no one professionally creating anything.

My history professor shocked the whole class when he revealed that there was no music, literature, nor paintings before copyright laws were invented.

One person might not be able to pay for the entire costs of creation, but groups of people certainly will. We have the technology for this. Platforms like Kickstarter, Patreon, GitHub Sponsors all enable this.

So if I wanted to write some notes or edit a photo you’re saying I should pay a team of developers to write custom code for me up front?

Literally nothing works like that.

There’s a huge difference between creative work and intellectual property, and a huge difference between the cost of creation and the cost of distribution.

The cost of distribution approaches zero. Once it's made, it's not actually scarce anymore. Intellectual property laws are all about creating artificial scarcity in order to increase distribution costs so as to compensate for the creation costs. Sooner or later, reality will reassert itself: people will pirate your product whether the laws allow it or not, simply because they can.

The ideal intellectual economy would be based on patronage where large amounts of people liberally support the creators they like. That way creators get compensated for the labour of creation, not the final result. Historical opposition to patronage involves fear of suppression by rich elites but now we have crowdfunding technology that enables sufficient decentralization, mitigating that risk.

Information is the product of intellectual work (among other things); it is composed of bits but is not itself bits.

We aren't paying for the bits.

Information is bits and therefore numbers. To deny this is to create a covert channel for copyright infringement. Copying films is infringement but if I convert it to a number and pass it around suddenly it's not infringement anymore? They will never accept this, so information must be bits which must be numbers.

A font has approximately 6000 kanji characters. You could operate with some fraction of these. But still any reasonable time spend on each can add up to significant amount of hours. And you probably want this from reasonably skilled person and then add some review effort on top.

Using the name of these companies instead of the private equity gouging ghouls who see everything we use as a potential choke point for being a rent-seeking vehicles is silly.

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