On Jul 25, 2005, at 5:02 AM, Noel Stoutenburg wrote:
and indeed, I am familiar with Adobe v. SSI; I would assert that the U.S. Supreme Court decision is illogical and complicated for this reason. The court held that SSI infringed software copyrights because the files manipulated by SSI were "small bit[s] of specialized software". But as I understand the court's opinion, if instead of applying mathematical algorithms in manipulating the digital files in the way that SSI did, I made a large (3600 point) hardcopy printout of the font character, and used that image to create a high density bitmap image, which I imported to a graphics editor, and manipulated the image according to the same general procedures employed by SSI, subsequently import the modified image into a font editor, the insertion of an analog step into the process removes any possibility of infringement, since there was point at which the "specialized bit of software" was inconsequential. So, comparing the result of the process with the added analog step, with the result obtained by SSI, it is doubtful that an expert in typography could identify the differences between fonts created with the two methods, yet applying the court's opinion, while the SSI fonts infringed, the identical ones created with an analog step in the process do not. To have two identical results, in which one is infringing, and the other not, is illogical and complicated.
Well, illogic is in the eye of the beholder, but to me this makes perfect sense.
The way a font is described in a font file is by a series of geometric equations that tell how to draw all the relevant curves and lines. THAT is what the "small bit of specialized software" is. There is value in those equations, because they are what make it possible to have a font on your computer which is reasonably compact and is not a gigantic bitmap file that becomes grainy if exploded to a large enough size.
The scheme you describe, in which you take pictures of the results of the software and then repackage them all as bitmaps does not copy the copyrighted equations. Why should it be an infringement? SSI copied the protected material. Your idea does not copy the protected material. That's the difference.
It sounds to me like you're being misled by the common misconception that "font" and "typeface" are synonymous (they aren't), and so if you hear that a "font" is copyrighted, you naturally assume that the protected material is the typeface. It is not. The protected material is the instructions for how to draw the typeface.
A better analogy would be a recipe. If I write up a fancy recipe, I can copyright the text of that recipe. If you then get someone to cook the meal for you, and then you proceed to reverse engineer the food in order to determine what's in it, you can do whatever you want with that information. All that my copyright protects is the written recipe itself.
This is entirely consistent with copyright law, which only protects written material. If you want protection for intellectual property that isn't written material, you have to try for something else, like a patent.
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