2) I reached out to van Rossum, and Xband Rough is indeed an "illegal clone" of FF Confidential; it's just been around forever and is ubiquitous. I have no idea whether the PSA used the original, and felt too shy to ask!
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Hi! I'm writing about this finding that seemed to come out of nowhere about the Xband Rough/FF font use in "You Wouldn't" campaign. Might I ask if you have any comment? (Following now for DM, but also into the future!)
While true, it would still not take away from the hypocrisy of not supporting the creator while screaming at everyone that you should support the creator.
van Rossum referred to it as a clone, but I'm not sure how strictly he was applying the term! The glyphs are identical, which I assume was a viable if potentially cumbersome option when it was made (which appears to have been in the mid-'90s).
a plausible explanation is that XBAND licensed FF Confidential and used it internally as XBAND Rough, and at some point it got extracted from a product or a brand asset package and started floating around the Internet uncredited
You need a licence to use a font unless it has been given away for free. A font is a work of skilled design. Why would anyone go to all the trouble of designing and selling fonts if they didn’t own copyright?
Under US law you can't copyright the typeface itself, but you *can* copyright the actual font files arguably (someone could pixel-accurate recreate it though and be fine).
Not accurate - you can copyright the name AND the "source code" if it is a digital font. If you trace over each character and your technique is different, it is 100% legal even if the design is identical. But you can't just repackage the font files and call it a day.
at least under US copyright law, close enough tracing is also infringement, you don't need a bit-accurate copy or the same "technique" (whatever that might be) or whatever
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In Germany, for example, a font, the look and feel, can absolutely be protected as a "Geschmacksmuster"/"eingetragenes Design" ( registered design)
No idea how it works in van Rossum's native Netherlands, though
So it’s a common practice among designers to open up a font file to see how the designer did it. It reveals a lot in how they are crafted.
But there’s really not much stoping you from renaming the masters and republishing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity
also, any creative expression is automatically copyrighted & name would be a trademark not ©
By "technique" I meant the way the fonts are constructed in a vector format. The same way that apps are constructed using code.
Quote from: https://www.crowdspring.com/blog/font-law-licensing/
However, when tracing a font, depending on the method, one may be effectively copying the font, not just the typeface.
Inaccurate roundtrip to bitmap and back probably isn't infringement in US but I'd expect that duplicating path points/metrics etc. probably is.
The IP stays with the designer/foundry.