Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Public Domain Fonts due to lack of copyright notice

[Rob Myers]

Christopher Fynn wrote:

 Even if it were legally permissible in the US to distribute pre-1989
 fonts  without a copyright notice or registered copyright - do you
 believe it would be ethical do this without the designer / font creators
 agreement? 

Yes, because this is how copyright works.

 Because something may be allowed under the law of a
 particular jurisdiction that does not make it morally and ethically OK.

Such as restricting people through use of copyright, for example.

 People who are most vocal about being able to distribute fonts freely
 most always seem to be talking about the work of others. 

There are fewer font designers than font users, so this is hardly
surprising.

 Why is it I
 don't hear this sort of suggestion from people who have designed serious
 original fonts on their own from scratch?

Would you agree that it is a good idea if they did?

- Rob.



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Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Public Domain Fonts due to lack of copyright notice

[Liam R E Quin]

On Thu, 2008-12-25 at 12:03 -0200, minombresbond wrote:
 here Ulrich Stiehl document that compiled more than 1000 Linotype
 fonts which are in public domain since at least January 2008
 
 http://www.sanskritweb.net/forgers/publicdomain.pdf
 


  Compiled by Ulrich Stiehl, Heidelberg 2008
 
  Fonts are not copyrightable as computer programs (font software) for 
  the following two simple reasons:
  Firstly, fonts are no computer programs. Secondly, font designers are no 
  computer programmers.

Clearly this writer is not a copyright lawyer :)

Neither am I, but when Ulrich writes, for example,
[[
OpenType fonts permit of encrypting and embedding hidden private buyer
data, e.g. postal and email address, bank account number, credit card
number etc. When you are connected to the internet, it is easy for
online shops to spy out your private data by reading the fonts installed
on your computer. In this way, online shops also obtain email addresses
for spamming purposes.
]]
you realise we're into tin-foil-hat land.  For what it's worth,
I'll mention that type 1 fonts can be (and sometimes have been)
watermarked too, as well as being able to contain customer data.

On Ulrich's page in general... it seems to me to be about those
diamonds in that store are really pretty and I want some and they
should share them and so I am going to find a way to pretend that
shoplifting is legal rather than about encouraging font designers
to consider new community-based business models.

The font industry has had a lot of problems in the past, and some of
these problems will be with us for a long time.  I think a lot of the
problems stemmed from conflicts of interest between font foundries,
printers, and suppliers of printing and typesetting machinery.  For
example, Linotype didn't want people to be able to use their fonts on
their competitors' typesetting machines.  So they used the best
protection they could find at the time -- trademark protection of
font names -- and refused to license the fonts.  Since the outlines
weren't copyright, this led to the competitors creating identical or
very similar fonts with similar names, so that they could sell their
equipment to people demanding the popular fonts of the day. And since
there was no single vendor of fonts that had control of the marketplace,
pretty much everyone ended up doing this, as far as I can tell, in both
directions: refusing to license their own fonts, and making (legal)
copies of other people's designs.

The people who lost out were firstly the customers, dealing with a
plethora of confusing typeface names, and fonts of varying quality,
and secondly the typeface designers, who would not be credited for
the copies at all.

Ulrich's arguments about font software are confused; partly that's
because his sources are confused, anbd partly it's because he has
the (common) idea that the US legal system follows principles that
are intuitive and correct.

In fact, legislators tend to try and re-use existing principles
wherever they can.

Ulrich writes,

[[
  However, many font buyers are dimwitted, and therefore font sellers make 
  these dimwitted font buyers
  believe that fonts are font software or computer programs and make 
  these dimwitted font buyers believe,
  for instance, that a judge, e.g. Chief Justice of the United States John G. 
  Roberts, if he draws the letter O
  with a drawing program, is at this very moment a computer programmer 
  writing a computer program
  (see below page 2).
]]

but only dim-witted people who didn't respect other's rights :-) would
write like that.

Ulrich also confuses the typeface design with the implementation, the
actual font.  You can go ahead and make a new font based on published
printed typeface samples and you're fine.  Just don't give it the same
name (trademark law).  A truetype font contains instructions, rather
like assembly code, that are executed, so it is certainly a program;
and computer programming skills are these days a part of font design.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org

Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Public Domain Fonts due to lack of copyright notice

[Liam R E Quin]

On Fri, 2008-12-26 at 00:43 -0500, fontfree...@aol.com wrote:
 On Mon, 2008-11-10 at 21:13 -0500, fontfree...@aol.com wrote:
  It's my understanding that anything published in the U.S. before
 March
  1, 1989 without a valid copyright notice is in the public domain.
  (unless the work was registered with the copyright office, fees
 paid
  within a short time period.)
 
 Your understanding is incorrect. [...]
  
 I stand by my understanding of US copyright law. Insofar that
 (Generally) anything published in the U.S. before March 1, 1989
 without a valid copyright notice is in the public domain. Here is a
 reference:
 
 In the document titled Copyright Office Basics, created by the:
  
 U.S. Copyright Office
 101 Independence Avenue SE
 Washington, DC 20559-6000 
  
 You can find this document by going to www.copyright.gov, and clicking
 on Copyright Basics.
 http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.pdf
 
 It states:
 Notice of Copyright
 The use of a copyright notice is no longer required under U.S. law,
 although it is often beneficial. Because prior law did contain such a
 requirement, however, the use of notice is still relevant to the
 copyright status of older works.
 
 Notice was required under the 1976 Copyright Act. This requirement was
 eliminated when the United States adhered to the Berne Convention,
 effective March 1, 1989.

This is an oversimplification -- elsewhere in that same document it's
noted that registration of copyright without a notice was also
sufficient under the 1976 act.  Also, the document continues to say,
[[
in the event that a work is infringed, if a proper
notice of copyright appears on the published copy or copies to
which a defendant in a copyright infringement suit had access,
then no weight shall be given to such a defendant's interposition
of a defense based on innocent infringement in mitigation
of actual or statutory damages [...]
]]
What this is saying is the same thing I said -- the lack of a
copyright notice does not place a work in the public domain.
Instead, it limits the damages, because people can claim that
they didn't know the work was copyright.
 
I will also reiterate that a *typeface* is not copyrightable,
but that a computer implemnentation (a font) is another matter.

However, just about all of the commercial outline fonts I've seen
have contained copyright statements in them.  The Type 1 font
format encouraged this very strongly, for example. 

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org