5 ms·
What's so fucked up is that there's no intellectual property protection for typefaces — in the eyes of the law they're just goddamn shapes. You hold copyright o
by blasdel 16y ago
What's so fucked up is that there's no intellectual property protection for typefaces — in the eyes of the law they're just goddamn shapes. You hold copyright over the exact contents of the distributed file, and you can trademark the name, but you can't stop someone from making an exact clone independently.
Microsoft licensed the original "Core Fonts" from Monotype, who had already made Arial as a metrically equivalent clone of Linotype's Helvetica, but slightly different because they would otherwise get yelled at by their dork friends, and it was just one more in a large pool of other very similar fonts. Then later generations of dorks curse them for making it slightly different. Now Google has commissioned a new set of pointlessly-different fonts, which they will be yelled at for. It would have been better if they'd just made direct clones — they'd still get yelled at by the same people, but at least shit wouldn't look fucked up. The only problem would be finding someone willing to make them.
Pretty much all of the bullshit surrounding fonts on the web stems from FUD from the handful of type foundries and their fanboys. Maybe Google should buy Monotype to free fonts the way they bought On2 to free video codecs: http://www.google.com/finance?q=TYPE http://www.google.com/finance?q=TYPE (as an added bonus they'd get Helvetica since Monotype now owns Linotype)
- ugh 16y agoWhat’s so hard about spending money for fonts you want to use? That’s what Microsoft should have done. That’s what Google should do.
- yason 16y agoWhat's so fucked up is that there's no intellectual property protection for typefaces Isn't that the way it should be in general? Nobody is allowed to copy specifically your program or font but they can copy the idea, invest in the effort, and come up with a similar one, often worse but sometimes better, themselves. With the following paragraphs of your post I agree fully. As soon as something becomes so ubiquitous as Helvetica, it should fall in public domain. (Or someone should pay for it and give it to everyone else.) Helvetica is so beautiful, timeless, that it would deserve to be free.
- chc 16y ago> Isn't that the way it should be in general? Nobody is allowed to copy specifically your program or font but they can copy the idea, invest in the effort, and come up with a similar one, often worse but sometimes better, themselves. Yes, but they aren't allowed to distribute your program just by grepping your name out. You can basically do that with a font AFAIK.
- blasdel 16y agoBut that's only because you can say you got the same resulting serialization of vectors from creating it yourself from scratch.
- blasdel 16y agoSorry about that, the introductory paragraph became unclear when I rearranged things. We fully agree, I think it's awesome that typefaces are not IP — what I find fucked up is the present situation where everyone tiptoes around that fact and kowtows to the foundries, because anything less would be an affront to typography itself (ala 'hating the troops'). Upstart type nerds everywhere could legally be crafting better-implemented versions of Helvetica — but they aren't, because other type-nerds would beat them up for paying such an insult to the $300m corporation that owns the name.