To me, the farce is laid perfectly bare by the fact that people pirate fonts. Fonts. Different fashions for the shapes of letters. Nobody can reasonably claim a

To me, the farce is laid perfectly bare by the fact that people pirate fonts. Fonts. Different fashions for the shapes of letters. Nobody can reasonably claim a right to Mrs. Eaves or Chaparral, or any kind of cultural deprivation for not being able to typeset their zines in Nueva or Myriad, but they're pirated just like everything else. They're so relentlessly pirated that it took well over a decade to get most "commercial" fonts on the web at all, and even today, using them is a mess, because we can't trust people not to pilfer them while writing comments about how they're striking a blow for open culture. In the US, typeface design is largely not copyrightable, however the TrueType font format is, as it contains actual code within it. If a font is redistributed in a pure data format, or as an image specimen, then within the jurisdiction of the US, there is no legal protection unless one has a design patent.