On Jul 23, 2005, at 8:40 PM, Noel Stoutenburg wrote:
Case law, or speculation? All that you describe is several direct
copies of a computer output.
causing me to note that a better way to have said this is "my
informed, lay (that is to say, I am not an attourney) interpretation
of case law suggests".
U.S. law is not necessarily logical on this issue, and may never be.
Regarding copyrights on fonts, the current guiding case is Adobe vs SSI
(1998), which you can read online at
<http://directory.serifmagazine.com/Ethics_and_Law/Copyright/
judgement.php4>.
The law is pretty straightforward, neither illogical nor complicated.
When you load a "font" on your system, what you are loading is not the
typeface per se, but a small bit of specialized software that tells the
computer how to draw all the characters within that typeface. Under
U.S. law, copyrights are routinely granted to software, and
font-drawing software is no different. That's why the copyright
applies to the coded font and not the typeface itself. If you copy the
font file on your computer, you're copying the software, which is
protected; if you get out a piece of paper and trace the shapes of the
letters, you're copying the typeface, which is not protected.
A font designer who wants protection for the actual typeface can
register for a design patent instead, which might protect the shapes.
In that case, it would have to meet the tests for patentability -- ie,
novelty, non-obviousness, and sufficient disclosure -- which is a much
harder standard.
Most designs are not protected, and so anyone can independently write
software to draw them. That's why you can see several different
digital versions of what ends up looking like the same typeface (eg,
Arial vs Helvetica, Palatino vs Book Antiqua, etc.).
I'm not a lawyer either, but I'm an amateur type geek, and I have a
brother and two friends who are professional type geeks (just back from
the big type conference in NY, in fact).
mdl
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