3 ms·

This license doesn't work in Japan for the result of font rendering is not protected by the copyright. It was decided in the court that in order the shape to b

by ezoe 6y ago

This license doesn't work in Japan for the result of font rendering is not protected by the copyright. It was decided in the court that in order the shape to be recognized as a character, that shape must follow the pattern we generally agree upon. The copyright is granted for the expression that reflect the human thought, if the shape can be recognized as a character, there is limited human thought left. I think that's a fair argument.

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
Font copyrights are connected to the embedded hinting program.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  My knowledge in font copyrights is limited, but what if one just removed the embedded hinting programs? Sure, it’d look bad, but would that fix the copyright issue?
  - jcrawfordor 6y ago
    More or less - this kind of thing does happen, but not by as technical means as extracting the hinting from the font (because you would need to provide new hinting anyway for it to look any good, and you get into a complex knowledge firewall situation doing that). Instead, it's common for font foundries to design a new font based on the result of an existing one, creating an effective duplicate font divorced of copyright claim. It's pretty common for a few differences to be inserted though, I think less out of concern over copyright and more so that it's possible to determine which font was used for license enforcement of the new one. This prominently happened with Arial, which is a copy of Helvetica designed by Monotype so that they could stop paying fees to license Helvetica from Linotype as part of their font offerings for early raster printers (back when fonts were embedded in the print engine). There are numerous other examples, to the extent that if one foundry offers a font which is particularly popular, the other major foundries probably also offer their own "version" of it.
necovek 6y ago
I am not sure it's that fair: have you ever attempted to design a typeface? FWIW, I am using "fair" in comparison with other copyrightable work: there's a lot of it that obviously did not involve a lot of "human thought" (Hollywood blockbusters included ;)).
- ezoe 6y ago
  The font data itself is copyrightable in Japan.

by ezoe 6y ago

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago

Font copyrights are connected to the embedded hinting program.

colejohnson66 6y ago
My knowledge in font copyrights is limited, but what if one just removed the embedded hinting programs? Sure, it’d look bad, but would that fix the copyright issue?
- jcrawfordor 6y ago
  More or less - this kind of thing does happen, but not by as technical means as extracting the hinting from the font (because you would need to provide new hinting anyway for it to look any good, and you get into a complex knowledge firewall situation doing that). Instead, it's common for font foundries to design a new font based on the result of an existing one, creating an effective duplicate font divorced of copyright claim. It's pretty common for a few differences to be inserted though, I think less out of concern over copyright and more so that it's possible to determine which font was used for license enforcement of the new one. This prominently happened with Arial, which is a copy of Helvetica designed by Monotype so that they could stop paying fees to license Helvetica from Linotype as part of their font offerings for early raster printers (back when fonts were embedded in the print engine). There are numerous other examples, to the extent that if one foundry offers a font which is particularly popular, the other major foundries probably also offer their own "version" of it.

necovek 6y ago

I am not sure it's that fair: have you ever attempted to design a typeface? FWIW, I am using "fair" in comparison with other copyrightable work: there's a lot of it that obviously did not involve a lot of "human thought" (Hollywood blockbusters included ;)).

ezoe 6y ago
The font data itself is copyrightable in Japan.