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Font Piracy – Interesting Read
by John D Berry – http://www.creativepro.com/article/dot- … to-justice
One of the most notorious font pirates has been captured on the high seas, hauled in irons to the King’s port town, and hanged on the scaffold in front of the cheering populace.
Well, no. That’s not how it works. Font pirates are not fabulous scallywags, cruising the sealanes in search of golden serifs, forcing corporate minions to walk the plank, and flying the Jolly Roger in the face of civilization. Font pirates might better be known as font burglars, or font thieves.
Ah, but that conjures up yet another romantic vision. International font thieves! Simultaneously italic and bold, they switch suavely from evening dress to the all-black garb of the cat burglar. Starring David Niven and Gig Young. I can see it now: the glittering cocktail party for the exotic princess, the fabulous rare fonts dangling from her neck, and the plot to steal them after midnight from the locked safe in her boudoir.
But no. It’s really a lot more sordid and petty than that. Font piracy just means stealing someone else’s work, which they’re trying to sell, and giving it away to all and sundry — or slapping your own name on it and selling it yourself. It’s robbery, and there’s nothing glamorous or Robin-Hood-like about it.
Information Wants to Be Stolen
The Hoefler Type Foundry recently sent out a press release, their first, addressed to "dear friends and colleagues," announcing a legal settlement with "a font pirate who we’ve been pursuing for some time, in concert with Emigre, House Industries, FontShop and others." As Jonathan Hoefler aptly put it in his accompanying e-mail, "None of us enjoyed this process. It was time consuming, unbelievably expensive, and just generally wretched."Hoefler summed up the process: "In 1999, someone nicknamed ‘Apostrophe’ hijacked all of our font libraries and posted them to a number of online forums. (Some of you receiving this e-mail are the very people for whom I created many of these faces.) Through an unprecedented sharing of resources, eleven type foundries cooperated to investigate and prosecute this matter; three years later, I’m happy to announce that we’ve finally settled with the malefactor."
No one likes to play the heavy, but as Hoefler says, "We’re pleased to have demonstrated that anyone discovered pirating fonts in any capacity will be held accountable to the entire industry."
The foundries involved in the lawsuit were the Hoefler Type Foundry Inc., Emigre Inc., Active Images, FSI Fonts und Software GmbH, International Type Founders, Inc., Jeffery C. Gillen d.b.a. Mindcandy, Rodrigo Cavazos d.b.a. Psy/Ops, and Treacyfaces Inc., representing the typeface designs of more than 40 typeface designers; Linotype and House Industries supported the suit. Most of those are small companies, some very small, and the designers who created the typefaces routinely devote an absurd amount of time, effort, and talent to the task of type design, only to reap pretty meager rewards even when everyone who uses their fonts pays for them. The days when large amounts of money could be made in the type business are long gone.
But It Grows on Trees
It’s very easy to steal fonts; all you have to do is copy them. Technically, if you copy a licensed font and give it to a friend to use, you’re in violation of the license agreement and are stealing that font. If your friend would otherwise have bought the font, thus giving the manufacturer and ultimately the designer their pittance (and it is a pittance; have you looked at how low font prices are these days?), then you’ve prevented that paltry sum from reaching the hands of the person who deserves it. If your friend is going to use that font professionally, and get paid for designs that use that font, then it’s doubly reprehensible (though legally no different).Type is a commodity today, available everywhere. Slews of fonts come as freebies with every computer and many software applications; those are legitimately licensed and ultimately paid for, but the fact that they’re free to the user devalues the sense that they’re really worth money. Each of those typefaces, if it’s any good, took many hours of careful work to develop; if it’s a text face, or an extended text family, it may well have taken months, or even years. (Every time you read a newspaper set in Times Roman, or a book set in Palatino, consider all the work and skill that went into making those letters work together so well on the page.)
Many users of digital fonts take a cavalier attitude toward them as intellectual property. Several years ago, a type designer in Russia explained the state of the type business there by saying that most users regarded type as a renewable resource. "Fonts grow on trees; when you pluck one off, another grows back in its place." This is hardly unique to Russia (and despite this attitude, there is a type business in Russia today, and much creative design being done); the practice, and the attitude, obviously thrives on some usenet usergroups in the United States and elsewhere.
At the same time, a proprietor of one of the best-known type foundries told me that among professional graphic designers, there is usually no hesitation about buying the fonts. In any large studio or corporation, the cost of buying fonts is a trivial part of the budget, and in even tiny one- and two-person shops there’s an honorable attitude that "if we’re making money from this, then the type designer should be making money from it too."
Honorable Behavior
There have been any number of schemes to prevent font piracy, from restrictions on embedding fonts in documents to elaborate digital registration systems to keep track of who sold what to whom. Some have even suggested devising "disposable fonts," which could only be used a limited number of times before they self-destruct. (It would be like one of those disposable cameras that you use once and then throw away. With the cameras, what you keep is the film; with fonts, what you’d keep would be the design you used them to create.)The best defense against font piracy, apart from the occasional costly lawsuit like the one against "Apostrophe," is to spread the word, to keep explaining to type users that the fonts they copy onto their computers are someone’s intellectual and artistic work, and that the designer deserves some reward every time their work is put to use.
Choose your fonts wisely. A few good, well-designed typefaces will be more useful in the long run than a slew of cheap knock-offs. And pay for the fonts you use. For type designers, that’s the bottom line.
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9 Replies
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The price of fonts is robbery in itself IMO.
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quote Steele Signs:The price of fonts is robbery in itself IMO.some of the bigger foundrys probably, but I have purchased some excellent fonts for for as little as $20 or $30. My $ is dearer than yours too.
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I think "some" are over priced, but in general, they are acceptable fees.
To be honest, when i think back to when we run a gerber 4b, we had only about 20 fonts, the outline function module cost a thousand quid on its own.
Fonts started at about #150.00 each and varied greatly. im going back 16 years now… thats when making ends meet as a sign company was difficult.
budget cutters, budget software, millions of fonts for free, the internet as a tool on its own… the modern day sign maker never had it so easy. The cheaper things get, the easier for the cowboys it gets… just my opinion. 🙄 -
Not too many years ago we had an engraver. Each font was $300 ea and they were embedded on a computer IC so they couldn’t be copied.
As you say Rob, these days everything is so much cheaper. Technology is a good thing, but if a business man/woman baulks at paying $20 or $40 for something that can make their job easier, enable them to charge a decent price, allow them more creativity, and be reusable, I’d question how professional and business like they actually are. 🙄
I thought of Jill today actually. Had a client come in looking for a Banner, Sat down and used Sarah Script, did a lovely layout if I do say so myself. But, he wanted Brush Script because it was such a modern font 😮 He wouldn’t be talked out of it either, so I’ve just finished seven 3 metre banners with Brush Script text.
Jill will never forgive me :lol1:
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quote Steele Signs:The price of fonts is robbery in itself IMO.How do you work that out? you don’t have a choice on being robbed. You certainly have a choice on the purchase of a font. Would have thought the average price of a font is £25 or so. Considering the work involved I would have thought that very reasonable.
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Brian, I guess you’ve experienced piracy 1st hand with your outlines. I agree with your comments.
Its amazing to me that we accept that we have to pay for material to print or cut, and we pay for ancillary items that make our job easier, but we squeal blue murder if someone steals our designs or concepts, or if we have to pay to use someone elses design or concept (fonts) to improve our own job, hopefully increasing the value.
I was going to say that we pay for software too, but I suspect font pirates probably, for the most part, buy cheaper pirated copies from fleabay, so thought better of that idea.
Simply put, if the font is too dear, don’t by it. But it would be hard to argue that the prices on somewhere like Myfonts.com are excessive for the majority of fonts.
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Old fashioned point of view, (mine) if you cant afford it, dont nick it.
the world is full of tea leaves, and most of us would be the first to complain, if we had any of our property stolen. no matter what the property is, font, or mobile phone, I dont see any difference..Peter
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Through many years of computer usage I have inherited many along the way, including the multitude of fonts that come with Corel, Microsoft and Engravelab to name a few, prob now is sorting the legit from the non-legit as I have 7-800 fonts onboard and little time to check them all. Ive bought a few, but never more than £25 each as there is always something close enough in that price bracket.
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Just like the music industry, film industry, retail and design, I rekon the fact of the matter would be, if nobody stole anything from anybody, the price of each and everything would come down as there would be no need to compensate for losses by charging more to the people who choose not to steal.
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