3 ms·

Copyright around fonts may not support such a suit in the same as way as works of art. Wikipedia says: "In the United States, the shapes of typefaces are not e

Copyright around fonts may not support such a suit in the same as way as works of art. Wikipedia says: "In the United States, the shapes of typefaces are not eligible for copyright but may be protected by design patent (although it is rarely applied for, the first US design patent that was ever awarded was for a typeface).[1]" So just scanning the rendered font (as opposed to the code that generates it), may be harder to stop than scanning of artwork. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_typefaces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...

jddj 3y ago
> may be harder to stop than scanning of artwork. Which has not been particularly easy to stop either
virtue3 3y ago
The interesting thing about law is that even if the law doesn't absolutely protect you; the person that you believe infringing on your work for free had better be prepared to pony up lawyer fees to defend their work. I think this would be one of the few times where I think that's useful. Typefaces take a lot of time and consideration and work to create so just blanket ripping off that work because we all take them for granted is kind of bullshit. I have conflicting thoughts about this. But at the end of the day if you only trained on open fonts they just aren't generally as good and the output should be not generally as good as opposed to training on nicer fonts that you technically don't have the rights to (but no one thoughts of this being an issue at the time of design patents / etc ). But we're now in the world where we will pay money to compute an AI model to design fonts instead of just paying designers to design fonts. The race to the bottom is accelerating at an alarming rate.
bmitc 3y ago
General question. What is the end game of all this? Corporations that have the money and other means are just wildly burning electricity while sucking up the world's art and knowledge work. How can anyone possibly protect their work in this no holds barred environment?

jddj 3y ago

> may be harder to stop than scanning of artwork. Which has not been particularly easy to stop either

virtue3 3y ago

The interesting thing about law is that even if the law doesn't absolutely protect you; the person that you believe infringing on your work for free had better be prepared to pony up lawyer fees to defend their work. I think this would be one of the few times where I think that's useful. Typefaces take a lot of time and consideration and work to create so just blanket ripping off that work because we all take them for granted is kind of bullshit. I have conflicting thoughts about this. But at the end of the day if you only trained on open fonts they just aren't generally as good and the output should be not generally as good as opposed to training on nicer fonts that you technically don't have the rights to (but no one thoughts of this being an issue at the time of design patents / etc ). But we're now in the world where we will pay money to compute an AI model to design fonts instead of just paying designers to design fonts. The race to the bottom is accelerating at an alarming rate.

bmitc 3y ago

General question. What is the end game of all this? Corporations that have the money and other means are just wildly burning electricity while sucking up the world's art and knowledge work. How can anyone possibly protect their work in this no holds barred environment?