37 ms·

How to legally pirate every font

336 points by flobosg 3y ago

clubm8 3y ago
Why would I care about legality while pirating? It's my understanding you're using it for profit you're gonna have to pay for the font, and conversely if I'm doing propaganda I don't care if you shoot me, so why do I care if you sue me?
- jackson1442 3y ago
  > It's my understanding you're using it for profit you're gonna have to pay for the font I've only read the article and am not familiar enough with copyright to outright tell a company to "go for it," but the author seems to be under the impression that font files generated using this technique are a-ok to use for profit.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  Why would you have to pay when copyright cannot be applied unless it's the entire file?
  - clubm8 3y ago
    >copyright cannot be applied unless it's the entire file I think you're mixing up the short clips thing that Girl Talk used for audio/video with fonts? I'm not sure the same case law applies. I'm also not a lawyer (thank christ)
- awesomeMilou 3y ago
  I was under the same impression, but it seems that in the majority of jurisdictions, the use of a Font does not meet the threshhold for a meaningful work under copyright law. To clarify, the use of the Font itself can be restricted under certain copyright aspects, i.e. offering tools or distributing the font file. But texts set in a specific font are no subject to copyright. > so why do I care if you sue me? Risk exposure I suppose? It seems copyright on fonts is mostly defined by case law. In the US, font files are apparently copyrightable because they're classified as a computer program, the actual artistic value of the displayed font is not taken into account at all. For more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_typefaces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...
  - clubm8 3y ago
    >I was under the same impression, but it seems that in the majority of jurisdictions, the use of a Font does not meet the threshhold for a meaningful work under copyright law. Thanks for this! I'll look for a citation in the bottom of the wikipedia, but I believe you. (Sorry to continue being "that guy" but while you raise good points about law and risk, I am once again forced to remind the hackers that Wikipeia is not a primary source) >It seems copyright on fonts is mostly defined by case law. In the US, font files are apparently copyrightable because they're classified as a computer program, the actual artistic value of the displayed font is not taken into account at all. I was born in Appalachia -- that's fucked up, especially since the "founding fathers" we Americans love to stan set much shorter copyright limits and many fonts, even computer ones, are quite old. >And that the author and authors of any map, chart, book or books already made and composed, and not printed or published, or that shall hereafter be made and composed, being a citizen or citizens of these United States, or resident therein, and his or their executors, administrators or assigns, shall have the sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending such map, chart, book or books, for the like term of fourteen years from the time of recording the title thereof in the clerk’s office as aforesaid. And if, at the expiration of the said term, the author or authors, or any of them, be living, and a citizen or citizens of these United States, or resident therein, the same exclusive right shall be continued to him or them, his or their executors, administrators or assigns, for the further term of fourteen years; Provided, He or they shall cause the title thereof to be a second time recorded and published in the same manner as is herein after directed, and that within six months before the expiration of the first term of fourteen years aforesaid. https://www.copyright.gov/history/1790act.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/history/1790act.pdf (apologies for formatting issues -- copy and paste from the pdf did not retain linebreaks etc) These fonts were made in the 80s, like me. They should be a free for all.
    - awesomeMilou 3y ago
      Primary source to US specific laws: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-37/chapter-II/subchapter-A/part-202/section-202.1 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-37/chapter-II/subchapter-... To quote from the article: >Typefaces cannot be protected by copyright in the United States The idea that typefaces cannot be copyrighted in the United States has been black letter law since the introduction of Code of Federal Regulations, Ch 37, Sec. 202.1(e) in 1992.[10] The legal precedent that typefaces are not eligible for protection under U.S. copyright law was established before that in 1978 in Eltra Corp. v. Ringer. However, fonts can be protected by design patent, and computer programs that implement typefaces may be protected by copyright. Which seems to be roughly the same as how it is handled in my home countries jurisdiction. I could have linked you an actual decision from my home countries national court, but I assumed posting links to german court decisions would only add to the confusion. I can try to find if the interpretation on the german wiki entry had a reference in english, that would show what I said was at least true for Germany, Switzerland and Austria. > These fonts were made in the 80s, like me. They should be a free for all. It makes some weird sense, from a legal standpoint. If you argue that a font file, i.e. the digital representation of a font constitutes as source code, you suddenly have a digital good that is widely accepted as being copyrightable. An exception would not make sense in that instance. Even then though, only the file representation, i.e. the code would be copyrightable. If you vectorize bitmaps of existing fonts, like in the article, you'd be fine. And honestly, it stands to reason that vector images files do not constitute a computer program, but you'd have to convince a judge that they cannot encode turing complete information. And first you'd have to teach a judge what a turing machine is.
- deleted 3y ago
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- gwern 3y ago
  If you wanted to create a font-generating NN and are worried about future IP laws deciding NNs are not transformative but mere derivative works of the training data, this would be potentially interesting. And if you wanted to ever sell such a business, say, to a certain private equity-owned company with $200m+ in annual revenue, it would be very useful to be able to show during due diligence that you had belt-and-suspenders your NN's data and it didn't all have to be thrown out & restarted from scratch.
Freedom2 3y ago
Does this work for fonts that haven't been released, or are still a work in progress? What's the scope of 'every font on Earth'?
- ComputerGuru 3y ago
  What about the font I designed on my air-gapped computer in a secure nuclear bunker that no one but me has seen? Obviously the author is wrong and this must not go uncorrected! Or maybe you’re just being a little overly pedantic?
logifail 3y ago
> [..] creative work that deserves to be copyrighted As I've grown older I've become less and less convinced that any of our current legal frameworks actually protect the output of "creatives". Instead, it seems that those with the deepest pockets - <cough> looking at you, Disney(!) - have, over the decades, moulded the system to fit their own purposes, leaving most actual creatives high and dry. When I read sentences including both "Abigail Disney" and "philanthropist" it makes me want to vomit.
- Angostura 3y ago
  > When I read sentences including both "Abigail Disney" and "philanthropist" it makes me want to vomit. Why?
  - kylebenzle 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - dkonofalski 3y ago
      >Maybe because it is a pharse Surely you meant 'farce'.
    - frogpelt 3y ago
      /sarcasm?
      - hotnfresh 3y ago
        Nah, you can’t earn a billion dollars. Dig the hourly rate for someone working 50 years to hit a billion. It’s just not possible. Nobody actually does that much good or delivers that much value. They just happen to capture or steal it somehow, combination of guile and right-place-right-time. If they “earn” it at all. It’s an artifact of our system that creates a few kinda capitalist-aristocrats, with about the same (poor) level of justification for the power they wield as feudalism had for dukes and kings and shit. Complete with it often having a hereditary element. [EDIT] Nb I'm not proposing an alternative, and I'm not sure how we might eliminate that wart on our system without doing more harm than good. But once you break a few tens-of-millions net worth, the rules of our economic system start doing some weird and probably not all that great things, "risk" becomes mostly pretend, and you can "earn" more than most do in a lifetime just being a middleman on access to your capital, and not necessarily a very good one. That reaching these levels isn't super connected to competence or expertise at acting as that sort of middleman—doubly so if it's inherited—makes it all rather inefficient and unfortunate and certainly unfair and even corrosive to democracy (since money converts so well into power), but, it's the system we've got and no, I don't have a better suggestion. But it's surely comparably unjust and evil to rule-by-divine-right and all that, which we're all used to dismissing as plainly silly and bad. A difference of small degree.
crazygringo 3y ago
Funny, I asked here on HN just a couple of months ago why nobody has done something like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37286891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37286891 The user 'pessimizer' replied that there was a company OptiFont that seemed to do something just like this, to sell cheap font clones: http://abfonts.freehostia.com/opti/ http://abfonts.freehostia.com/opti/ http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-27506.html http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-27506.html It still seems so relatively trivial to automate this -- just render every character on a <canvas> at a fixed known font size at super-high resolution and autotrace outlines, and render every character pair to figure out kerning, and the common ligatures. The only major thing missing is hinting, but that's irrelevant for printed material and not very important on retina screens -- and auto-hinting gets you more than halfway there on non-retina. (And then there are all sorts of special font features like nonstandard ligatures, which can either be more carefully replicated, or just ignored.) I'm not saying it would be a good/ethical thing to do this (I personally want designers to be supported) -- but I am kind of amazed that the market for digital fonts still exists, when in theory you can produce a perfectly legal copy and not pay a thing.
- ComputerGuru 3y ago
  Your approach would result in impossibly large binary font sizes unless a really good (smart) engine was present and utilized to separate the hinting logic from the underlying symbols. Then again, with most fonts these days putting in zero manual hinting work and just relying on the default font engine heuristics, it might not.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    I was supposing zero hinting information would be included, so the file sizes should be perfectly normal. Because while font glyphs/designs aren't copyrightable, I'm assuming that hinting instructions are, even if they could be reverse-engineered this way.
- quitit 3y ago
  >but I am kind of amazed that the market for digital fonts still exists, when in theory you can produce a perfectly legal copy and not pay a thing. There is a growing trend for style guides to use typefaces from no-cost or open libraries. This isn't limited to small companies either, I can think of a handful of industry heavyweights in tech, food and medicine who each have taken up this approach. This forms the first reason not to dupe fonts, because there's plenty of good ones already available for no cost. I've found that companies that do this have an easier time of staying on brand since it's so simple to obtain the necessary fonts. As for seeking out deliberate copies of popular fonts, there's a few reasons why an agency wouldn't want to propose this: 1. It's easier to sell in a well loved font, with a proven character from a foundry with heritage. Imagine talking to a board of suits, they're often looking for the safe option. 2. It's kind of a dick move for an agency to be ripping off the foundries, especially small modern ones. Creatives do enjoy what typographers make and can see the love put into their craft. 3. Typographers are not faceless. Modern font designers are still alive and active on socials, you might personally know who you are ripping off. 4. There's a bit of hypocrisy in hating on frankenfonts such as Arial, while deliberately seeking out dupes. 5. It's trivial to open a font in a font editor and resave it with different specs, if a creative wants to be sneaky they can just do this themselves anyway. 6. Adobe have also thrown their hat into this ring by offering a range of popular fonts available for use for no extra cost with their creative cloud subscription. It's not needed to seek out a dupe-font, when the real thing is available with a few clicks.
23B1 3y ago
Considering the amount of work it takes to build a font – the amount of mind-numbing care, testing, iterating, crafting... please do not steal fonts. There's no big bad studios or MPAA between these typographers and the world taking the bulk of their money, and they barely scrape by as it is. Pirate all the lame movies you want, but please, if nothing else, pay typographers and buy direct from their foundries. If any brave souls are interested in legally pirating all existing fonts and being taken there, I think you’d likely be doing a service to society here in challenging this. The service to society is already being done by the typographers. The service you can do to society is to pay them for their passion, precision, and care.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  > There's no big bad studios or MPAA between these typographers and the world taking the bulk of their money Where do fonts come from? Monotype, mostly https://thehustle.co/where-do-fonts-come-from/ https://thehustle.co/where-do-fonts-come-from/
  - 23B1 3y ago
    Cool – use AI to build a free service that competes with Monotype.
- Grae 3y ago
  The author agrees with you. They're saying that the lack of legal protection for fonts is a problem, and that creating an opportunity to challenge that law would be a good thing. Courts can only weigh in on legal issues when people bring a dispute before the court. In this case, if someone did what the author describes it would trigger a lawsuit from typographers, which would give the court a chance to (re)interpret or overturn the existing law.
  - manuelmoreale 3y ago
    I think the vast majority of typefaces can’t really have legal protection from a creative stand point because they’re so close to each other that it’s incredibly hard to argue that they’re original content. Just compare Inter vs Roboto vs San Francisco. Are they different? Technically yes. Are they different enough to allow for all three to be granted legal protection? I’d say no. And if you say yes, then it comes down to how different is different enough and the entire field becomes a legal nightmare
nrjames 3y ago
Sounds quite a lot like "They're just PNGs on the Internet. Why would you pay for that when you can just copy it for free?" The article is interesting from a technical point of view but feels yucky from a fairness point of view, regardless of legality. I may not have a ton of respect for the large corporation that owns the copyright on the file, but I do have respect for the creatives who make fonts (and other things) for a living.
- dzek69 3y ago
  The author of the article claims to not actually support piracy and ask to support the font makers. But from a technical point of view it's still somehow interesting It's like learning about some security tools like shodan - here is how you can mess something up, but don't do it
- codedokode 3y ago
  Big corporations shamelessly digitize old fonts and claim copyright, take Microsoft as an example [1]. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/ru-ru/typography/font-list/bookman-old-style https://learn.microsoft.com/ru-ru/typography/font-list/bookm...
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  TFA's author is arguing that it seems to be possible to do this, but as a font-author he finds it disreputable (you have to read to the end). He's arguing, I think, that fonts only became copyrightable when font files came along, with the arrival of PCs with GUIs. And that what became copyrightable was a font file. He argues that this is a weird anomaly; and I agree. But I draw a different conclusion; the introduction of copyright on font files was seriously annoying to me at the dawn of the PC age, because fonts were among the first digital objects that were copyrightable (that I had access to). With the exception of fonts, I could copy and re-purpose anything I found. I suspect fonts may have been the battering ram that led to the present situation of copyright maximalism. I don't mean to talk down the effort, judgement and skill that goes into creating a typeface; but I've never had much time for maximalists. I'd go back to author's lifetime, and I wouldn't allow immortal "persons" (corporations) to have copyrights.
bloqs 3y ago
Does anyone understand how this law works in the UK?
- gnufx 3y ago
  The legislation is https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/part/I/chapter/III/crossheading/typefaces https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/part/I/chapter/... Long ago I had to read the Act on microfiche.
ugh123 3y ago
Great info! I waded into this territory recently when trying to find a font that I can re-distribute as a system font for a device i'm building. Apparently this is completely restricted and disallowed according to pretty much every commercial license i've read from a long list of font shop sites. Instead, the intended use as spelled out in their commercial licenses boils down to the font buyer using it only to render graphics for printing or some other artistic use, rather than a "mechanical" use such as mine. Even after contacting some of them, they're unwilling to budge. After reading your post, I suspect one issue may be that some (many?) of the fonts sold on these sites are already pirated, and the site wants to protect itself from the only real copyright/legal threat of redistribution of the digital file. I've also found that many font authors don't even intend their fonts to be used as system/pc fonts. But rather something that can be imported into Adobe Illustrator (or the like) for further design work for print and graphic images - many of the font files themselves typically only contain A-Za-z letters (sometimes only capitals!), sometimes not even numbers, and only a few common punctuation characters.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  At that point, I'd go for one of the many legitimately open source fonts, some of which have been released into public domain [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_Unicode_typefaces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_Unicode_typefaces
pbhjpbhj 3y ago
Couple of issues I spotted: >most type foundries protect their fonts by copyrighting the font files themselves Copyright is applied at the point of creation of a work, so unless they're in jurisdictions with no copyright law then they all acquire copyright on their font files. >Since you’re entering into a legal agreement with the type foundry themselves, they can put whatever limits on how you can use the font, regardless of local copyright law. You can't normally disclaim obligations or rights provided by law unless explicitly allowed to do so. For example, in most jurisdictions you can make copies to aid creation of a tool for blind people (cf Marrakesh Treaty), so copying to feed into an ML algorithm to improve a text(image)-to-speech tool may be allowed even if the company put in their terms "no unauthorised storage on a computing system or in a database". An interesting example of this is attempting to put work "into the public domain" depending on jurisdiction you might not be able to do that before the copyright expires 'naturally'. these are my opinions only and do not relate to my employment
- trogdor 3y ago
  >Copyright is applied at the point of creation of a work, so unless they're in jurisdictions with no copyright law then they all acquire copyright on their font files. Yes, but in the United States, copyright registration is a prerequisite for copyright litigation. According to 17 U. S. C. §411(a), “no civil action for infringement of the copyright in any United States work shall be instituted until . . . registration of the copyright claim has been made in accordance with this title.” The Supreme Court addressed this head-on in Fourth Estate v. Wall Street. See: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2018/17-571 https://www.oyez.org/cases/2018/17-571
  - bragr 3y ago
    >no civil action for infringement of the copyright in any United States work... It's not a US work if it wasn't made in the US. That's the crux of the point you're replying to
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    Assuming your summation to be true, then that is really interesting as it breaks USA's obligations under the Berne Convention (which they didn't join until about 100 years after most of the West) which was the reason registration was ended as a requirement (but was still useful due to, AIUI, pecuniary damages being awarded for registered works whilst only actual damages are/were? awarded for unregistered). I think you have erred, the question before the court concerned when registration bites. My understanding is 17 USC 106 still applies, but civil actions before the court require a registration to have been initiated; I thought that was just a filter on court actions? Happy to be corrected. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/411 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/411 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106 https://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/ https://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/
dzek69 3y ago
I have no problem with fonts pricing I have problem with the crazy licensing Yes, you can use that font, but only for print and websites and your website cannot generate more than 100k views monthly and your business annual revenue can be higher than 1m If you don't pass these we have more licensing options with different numbers and prices. if you want an app (is WebView in an APK file an app? Is PWA an app?) there is separate price as well You can host the font file on your server (browser must obviously download it) but you cannot actually distribute it - whatever that means, it could be risky with open source apps for example This is so bullshit I prefer to always use Google fonts or any other source of 100% free for anything fonts. You don't want my money - sure, your choice
- neontomo 3y ago
  Yeah, even with stock image platforms, having different licenses on every photo becomes a research project if you are working with any great amount of photos. I much prefer it when the websites have a standard license that is applicable to everything on there, because I only have to read it once. Also, if I can't use a resource I paid for in commercial use, it's pretty, but pretty useless.
  - gnopgnip 3y ago
    With stock images there is really only one question, commercial use or editorial use. This distinction is more often about the subject than any decision made by the photographer or platform. Like a photo of any famous person is going to be editorial, unless you get the subject's permission. The license will be royalty free on even the cheapest microstock services
- Macha 3y ago
  This is also why so many tech companies invent their own fonts to avoid the whole licensing quagmires.
  - Spivak 3y ago
    Plus if you have someone just hanging around who's a font nerd it's fun, saves money, gives you fodder for the marketing machine, and you get a more distinct brand with your company's "handwriting." It's not actually that hard to make your own font -- like you have to try to make an actively bad font. And since the value-add is mostly character I'm shocked how much people who license fonts jerk you around.
phyzome 3y ago
Tell me more about "legal piracy".
- Tao3300 3y ago
  > legal piracy I'm going to need to see a valid letter of marque!
- ddingus 3y ago
  I believe the thing we are looking for is legal infringement. Rights holder would rather not have something happen, but it is allowed to happen anyway, despite technically being infringing.
aiunboxed 3y ago
It reminds me of how there was a dispute of X's logo being taken from a mono type font https://www.ft.com/content/da262b2a-f39a-466b-9b2f-2f8fa84f0117 https://www.ft.com/content/da262b2a-f39a-466b-9b2f-2f8fa84f0...
- LoganDark 3y ago
  Do you have a non-paywalled link?
phendrenad2 3y ago
So which is it? Piracy? Or legal? It can't be both...
RobotToaster 3y ago
This doesn't account for optional ligatures in OTF fonts. I think it may not work on svg-otf fonts, since they can have colour, line thickness, etc.
- gwern 3y ago
  Why wouldn't the ligatures show up in images online? Someone's going to screenshot the alternatives at some point - the specimen, if nothing else. (And if they never show up and so can't be traced, then they couldn't've been all that important.)
K2L8M11N2 3y ago
I think this essay is relevant here: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 > Suppose you publish an article that happens to contain a sentence identical to one from this article, like "The law sees Colour." That's just four words, all of them common, and it might well occur by random chance. Maybe you were thinking about similar ideas to mine and happened to put the words together in a similar way. If so, fine. But maybe you wrote "your" article by cutting and pasting from "mine" - in that case, the words have the Colour that obligates you to follow quotation procedures and worry about "derivative work" status under copyright law and so on. Exactly the same words - represented on a computer by the same bits - can vary in Colour and have differing consequences. When you use those words without quotation marks, either you're an author or a plagiarist depending on where you got them, even though they are the same words. It matters where the bits came from.
- jibbit 3y ago
  this is a basic misunderstanding of copyright
  - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
    Is the GP misunderstanding copyright, or is GP describing a common basic misunderstanding? If the former, could you please elaborate? I also frequently cite this article in discussions.
jejeyyy77 3y ago
just automate running through StableDiffusion and generate a slight variation. Done.
- JW_00000 3y ago
  If you give StableDiffusion a copyrighted work and ask it to generate a slight variation, the output will still be a derivative work.
  - jejeyyy77 3y ago
    Remains to be seen
deleted 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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r3trohack3r 3y ago
Fun to think about, have personally gone down this rabbit hole before, but I'd be surprised if this was permitted by courts. > The key point here is that the shape of the glyphs themselves, for example, non-trademarked text posted on advertisements or products with printed text, are not copyrightable. So long as you’re not stealing the creative work, like the advertisement, itself, the shape of each letter is in the public domain. There is a jump from this assertion to: > This got me thinking, as all things do, on whether I could simply scrape the internet for public, non-creative, non-trademarked use of fonts The missing step here is that the glyphs for a webpage are not embedded in some sort of rendered image or physical medium. They're _rendered from the copyrighted font file_ to the browser. The font file is delivered to the browser and that copyrighted file is used to render the glyphs. This pipeline might work for creating a font that is "inspired by" the available glyphs rendered in the credits of your favorite film. But downloading the entire copyrighted font file, generating a character sheet from it and clipping the individual characters from that sheet? I can't imagine how any sensible court system would not consider that a derivative work.
- abirch 3y ago
  I believe he's downloading png files from Meta, converting them to SVG, then creating the glyphs. I'm not sure what the law is on this, but there's no need for the font files to ever be on your computer. E.g., https://render.myfonts.net/fonts/font_rend.php?id=a6719376b92bdadcac7abeed4363c796&rt=HackerNews https://render.myfonts.net/fonts/font_rend.php?id=a6719376b9...
  - codedokode 3y ago
    Microsoft does exactly this with 19th and 18th century fonts, for example [1]. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/ru-ru/typography/font-list/baskerville-old-face https://learn.microsoft.com/ru-ru/typography/font-list/baske...
    - tuukkah 3y ago
      Those are probably in public domain because of their age though.
miragecraft 3y ago
Aside from the fact that I’m not a fan of piracy, you can’t claim something is legal when there’s a lot of wiggle room. What it comes down to is what you can legally prove in court and that means having big foundries sue you and having to defend yourself. Nobody wants to go through that just to use some fonts when there are open fonts available. If you want something custom then pick a variable font, such as Roboto Flex, and customize it beyond recognition. In fact that’s where I see the future is headed - “master” variable fonts with all the axis, variant glyphs etc. available to be tweaked. The user then gets to play with dials and knobs and when satisfied recompile the font to be non-variable in order to shave down the file size.
- codedokode 3y ago
  Big foundries digitize old fonts and claim copyright on them. Take Microsoft as an example, who took 19th century font and sells it [1] [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/ru-ru/typography/font-list/bookman-old-style https://learn.microsoft.com/ru-ru/typography/font-list/bookm...
  - miragecraft 3y ago
    You're free to make competing digitized fonts using the same source material.
sigzero 3y ago
"legally pirate" is an oxymoron.
analyte123 3y ago
The legal term for the glyphs is "typeface" [1]. Last time I looked at this, it also implied that emoji images that are used in a font, for example Apple's emojis, were potentially not copyrightable either, at least when used as text [2] (and not for example, as a UI element or by themselves on a t-shirt). I recall that at the time, Telegram had completely copied Apple's emoji images into their own font, but I'm not sure if they still do. [1] https://nwalsh.com/comp.fonts/FAQ/cf_13.htm https://nwalsh.com/comp.fonts/FAQ/cf_13.htm [2] https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=2ae2643d-f307-4521-8a85-9290b92464e4 https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=2ae2643d-f307...
tasuki 3y ago
> a project that begged for a better, licensed font Eh. There are plenty of good fonts with permissive licensees. Also, good typography is much more about sizing and spacing than about picking a better font.
sleepybrett 3y ago
Farming the internet for kerning values is going to be a bit of a crapshoot. Many designers don't just type a headline and export to png, often kerning is manually adjusted (especially with headlines, but also during book-type layout kerning may be adjusted on whole blocks of text or just a few words in order to help balance a page or block)
Animats 3y ago
The next step should be a machine learning system which looks at samples of a font, learns what the font looks like, and then can generate characters in that style it hasn't seen, based on a large training set of other fonts. This would be useful when you want to fill out a font that doesn't have all the characters you need.
raylad 3y ago
This process still won't get the hinting that allows fonts to look good at many different sizes.
naet 3y ago
"Final reminder that I’m not a lawyer and have no clue if anything I said is actually correct, so none of this is legal advice and I strongly recommend you go talk to a lawyer before attempting anything here. I’d also strongly emphasize the importance of supporting the incredible work behind your favorite typefaces by purchasing fonts directly, I definitely do not advocate ever for stealing anyone’s work." The project is fun and a cool idea, but don't take the headline at face value. Would something like this hold up in court? My guess is that it probably won't. If a lawyer can demonstrate that you've perfectly recreated a copyright font I'm guessing a fair number of judges or juries would find you in violation of copyright regardless of the method used to make the recreation. Either way you're opening yourself up to a potentially expensive legal headache if discovered.
deleted 3y ago
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hwc 3y ago
if the nocopy flag is set on a font, Chrome will not embed that font into a PDF when you do "print to PDF". instead, the shapes are used to create a type3 font. This is a way the author can get the vector shape of the glyphs without touching the TTF files. (or that was true back when I worked on that code, two jobs back!)
postmodest 3y ago
I have fonts installed on my computer that I received from a boxed CorelDraw! Install in probably 1993. These have names like "Swiss721" and were created by Bitstream as visual clones of Helvetica or Times. Visual cloning of fonts is technically legal and has a long standing tradition. But "While technically not illegal, font designer John Hudson would describe its selling of large numbers of typefaces on CD at discount prices as "one of the worst instances of piracy in the history of type"."
Guvante 3y ago
Doubtful the courts would allow this shell game. Just because a particular usage is not protected doesn't mean you can do anything with it.
steakscience 3y ago
You also cannot copyright recipes
DiabloD3 3y ago
I love how he uses the Berkeley Graphics license as an example, yet ignores the fact that you buy their font, Berkeley Mono, because you want a very well engineered font. Like, there are straight up only two fonts I will say are engineered well, objectively: Berkeley Mono is the #2 on that list, PragmataPro being #1. It isn't about aesthetic quality, its down to how well hinted they are, and how well they render at absurdly small sizes on a wide range of renderers.
k310 3y ago
I am getting a 404 Thursday Oct 12 at 7:45 Pacific. Long story short, it's not at his blog, nor at his notion. The wayback machine has it at: https://web.archive.org/web/20231012051743/https://blog.willdepue.com/how-to-legally-pirate-all-fonts-in-an-afternoon https://web.archive.org/web/20231012051743/https://blog.will... There were 14 captures yesterday and today and no more, it seems. I remember when life was simpler. Last week. Cheers
m0d0nne11 3y ago
Oooops! that page may now have been taken down...

336 points by flobosg 3y ago

Why would I care about legality while pirating? It's my understanding you're using it for profit you're gonna have to pay for the font, and conversely if I'm doing propaganda I don't care if you shoot me, so why do I care if you sue me?

jackson1442 3y ago
> It's my understanding you're using it for profit you're gonna have to pay for the font I've only read the article and am not familiar enough with copyright to outright tell a company to "go for it," but the author seems to be under the impression that font files generated using this technique are a-ok to use for profit.
ipaddr 3y ago
Why would you have to pay when copyright cannot be applied unless it's the entire file?
- clubm8 3y ago
  >copyright cannot be applied unless it's the entire file I think you're mixing up the short clips thing that Girl Talk used for audio/video with fonts? I'm not sure the same case law applies. I'm also not a lawyer (thank christ)
awesomeMilou 3y ago
I was under the same impression, but it seems that in the majority of jurisdictions, the use of a Font does not meet the threshhold for a meaningful work under copyright law. To clarify, the use of the Font itself can be restricted under certain copyright aspects, i.e. offering tools or distributing the font file. But texts set in a specific font are no subject to copyright. > so why do I care if you sue me? Risk exposure I suppose? It seems copyright on fonts is mostly defined by case law. In the US, font files are apparently copyrightable because they're classified as a computer program, the actual artistic value of the displayed font is not taken into account at all. For more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_typefaces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...
- clubm8 3y ago
  >I was under the same impression, but it seems that in the majority of jurisdictions, the use of a Font does not meet the threshhold for a meaningful work under copyright law. Thanks for this! I'll look for a citation in the bottom of the wikipedia, but I believe you. (Sorry to continue being "that guy" but while you raise good points about law and risk, I am once again forced to remind the hackers that Wikipeia is not a primary source) >It seems copyright on fonts is mostly defined by case law. In the US, font files are apparently copyrightable because they're classified as a computer program, the actual artistic value of the displayed font is not taken into account at all. I was born in Appalachia -- that's fucked up, especially since the "founding fathers" we Americans love to stan set much shorter copyright limits and many fonts, even computer ones, are quite old. >And that the author and authors of any map, chart, book or books already made and composed, and not printed or published, or that shall hereafter be made and composed, being a citizen or citizens of these United States, or resident therein, and his or their executors, administrators or assigns, shall have the sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending such map, chart, book or books, for the like term of fourteen years from the time of recording the title thereof in the clerk’s office as aforesaid. And if, at the expiration of the said term, the author or authors, or any of them, be living, and a citizen or citizens of these United States, or resident therein, the same exclusive right shall be continued to him or them, his or their executors, administrators or assigns, for the further term of fourteen years; Provided, He or they shall cause the title thereof to be a second time recorded and published in the same manner as is herein after directed, and that within six months before the expiration of the first term of fourteen years aforesaid. https://www.copyright.gov/history/1790act.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/history/1790act.pdf (apologies for formatting issues -- copy and paste from the pdf did not retain linebreaks etc) These fonts were made in the 80s, like me. They should be a free for all.
  - awesomeMilou 3y ago
    Primary source to US specific laws: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-37/chapter-II/subchapter-A/part-202/section-202.1 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-37/chapter-II/subchapter-... To quote from the article: >Typefaces cannot be protected by copyright in the United States The idea that typefaces cannot be copyrighted in the United States has been black letter law since the introduction of Code of Federal Regulations, Ch 37, Sec. 202.1(e) in 1992.[10] The legal precedent that typefaces are not eligible for protection under U.S. copyright law was established before that in 1978 in Eltra Corp. v. Ringer. However, fonts can be protected by design patent, and computer programs that implement typefaces may be protected by copyright. Which seems to be roughly the same as how it is handled in my home countries jurisdiction. I could have linked you an actual decision from my home countries national court, but I assumed posting links to german court decisions would only add to the confusion. I can try to find if the interpretation on the german wiki entry had a reference in english, that would show what I said was at least true for Germany, Switzerland and Austria. > These fonts were made in the 80s, like me. They should be a free for all. It makes some weird sense, from a legal standpoint. If you argue that a font file, i.e. the digital representation of a font constitutes as source code, you suddenly have a digital good that is widely accepted as being copyrightable. An exception would not make sense in that instance. Even then though, only the file representation, i.e. the code would be copyrightable. If you vectorize bitmaps of existing fonts, like in the article, you'd be fine. And honestly, it stands to reason that vector images files do not constitute a computer program, but you'd have to convince a judge that they cannot encode turing complete information. And first you'd have to teach a judge what a turing machine is.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gwern 3y ago
If you wanted to create a font-generating NN and are worried about future IP laws deciding NNs are not transformative but mere derivative works of the training data, this would be potentially interesting. And if you wanted to ever sell such a business, say, to a certain private equity-owned company with $200m+ in annual revenue, it would be very useful to be able to show during due diligence that you had belt-and-suspenders your NN's data and it didn't all have to be thrown out & restarted from scratch.

Freedom2 3y ago

Does this work for fonts that haven't been released, or are still a work in progress? What's the scope of 'every font on Earth'?

ComputerGuru 3y ago
What about the font I designed on my air-gapped computer in a secure nuclear bunker that no one but me has seen? Obviously the author is wrong and this must not go uncorrected! Or maybe you’re just being a little overly pedantic?

logifail 3y ago

> [..] creative work that deserves to be copyrighted As I've grown older I've become less and less convinced that any of our current legal frameworks actually protect the output of "creatives". Instead, it seems that those with the deepest pockets - <cough> looking at you, Disney(!) - have, over the decades, moulded the system to fit their own purposes, leaving most actual creatives high and dry. When I read sentences including both "Abigail Disney" and "philanthropist" it makes me want to vomit.

Angostura 3y ago
> When I read sentences including both "Abigail Disney" and "philanthropist" it makes me want to vomit. Why?
- kylebenzle 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - dkonofalski 3y ago
    >Maybe because it is a pharse Surely you meant 'farce'.
  - frogpelt 3y ago
    /sarcasm?
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      Nah, you can’t earn a billion dollars. Dig the hourly rate for someone working 50 years to hit a billion. It’s just not possible. Nobody actually does that much good or delivers that much value. They just happen to capture or steal it somehow, combination of guile and right-place-right-time. If they “earn” it at all. It’s an artifact of our system that creates a few kinda capitalist-aristocrats, with about the same (poor) level of justification for the power they wield as feudalism had for dukes and kings and shit. Complete with it often having a hereditary element. [EDIT] Nb I'm not proposing an alternative, and I'm not sure how we might eliminate that wart on our system without doing more harm than good. But once you break a few tens-of-millions net worth, the rules of our economic system start doing some weird and probably not all that great things, "risk" becomes mostly pretend, and you can "earn" more than most do in a lifetime just being a middleman on access to your capital, and not necessarily a very good one. That reaching these levels isn't super connected to competence or expertise at acting as that sort of middleman—doubly so if it's inherited—makes it all rather inefficient and unfortunate and certainly unfair and even corrosive to democracy (since money converts so well into power), but, it's the system we've got and no, I don't have a better suggestion. But it's surely comparably unjust and evil to rule-by-divine-right and all that, which we're all used to dismissing as plainly silly and bad. A difference of small degree.

crazygringo 3y ago

Funny, I asked here on HN just a couple of months ago why nobody has done something like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37286891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37286891 The user 'pessimizer' replied that there was a company OptiFont that seemed to do something just like this, to sell cheap font clones: http://abfonts.freehostia.com/opti/ http://abfonts.freehostia.com/opti/ http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-27506.html http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-27506.html It still seems so relatively trivial to automate this -- just render every character on a <canvas> at a fixed known font size at super-high resolution and autotrace outlines, and render every character pair to figure out kerning, and the common ligatures. The only major thing missing is hinting, but that's irrelevant for printed material and not very important on retina screens -- and auto-hinting gets you more than halfway there on non-retina. (And then there are all sorts of special font features like nonstandard ligatures, which can either be more carefully replicated, or just ignored.) I'm not saying it would be a good/ethical thing to do this (I personally want designers to be supported) -- but I am kind of amazed that the market for digital fonts still exists, when in theory you can produce a perfectly legal copy and not pay a thing.

ComputerGuru 3y ago
Your approach would result in impossibly large binary font sizes unless a really good (smart) engine was present and utilized to separate the hinting logic from the underlying symbols. Then again, with most fonts these days putting in zero manual hinting work and just relying on the default font engine heuristics, it might not.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  I was supposing zero hinting information would be included, so the file sizes should be perfectly normal. Because while font glyphs/designs aren't copyrightable, I'm assuming that hinting instructions are, even if they could be reverse-engineered this way.
quitit 3y ago
>but I am kind of amazed that the market for digital fonts still exists, when in theory you can produce a perfectly legal copy and not pay a thing. There is a growing trend for style guides to use typefaces from no-cost or open libraries. This isn't limited to small companies either, I can think of a handful of industry heavyweights in tech, food and medicine who each have taken up this approach. This forms the first reason not to dupe fonts, because there's plenty of good ones already available for no cost. I've found that companies that do this have an easier time of staying on brand since it's so simple to obtain the necessary fonts. As for seeking out deliberate copies of popular fonts, there's a few reasons why an agency wouldn't want to propose this: 1. It's easier to sell in a well loved font, with a proven character from a foundry with heritage. Imagine talking to a board of suits, they're often looking for the safe option. 2. It's kind of a dick move for an agency to be ripping off the foundries, especially small modern ones. Creatives do enjoy what typographers make and can see the love put into their craft. 3. Typographers are not faceless. Modern font designers are still alive and active on socials, you might personally know who you are ripping off. 4. There's a bit of hypocrisy in hating on frankenfonts such as Arial, while deliberately seeking out dupes. 5. It's trivial to open a font in a font editor and resave it with different specs, if a creative wants to be sneaky they can just do this themselves anyway. 6. Adobe have also thrown their hat into this ring by offering a range of popular fonts available for use for no extra cost with their creative cloud subscription. It's not needed to seek out a dupe-font, when the real thing is available with a few clicks.

23B1 3y ago

Considering the amount of work it takes to build a font – the amount of mind-numbing care, testing, iterating, crafting... please do not steal fonts. There's no big bad studios or MPAA between these typographers and the world taking the bulk of their money, and they barely scrape by as it is. Pirate all the lame movies you want, but please, if nothing else, pay typographers and buy direct from their foundries. If any brave souls are interested in legally pirating all existing fonts and being taken there, I think you’d likely be doing a service to society here in challenging this. The service to society is already being done by the typographers. The service you can do to society is to pay them for their passion, precision, and care.

cratermoon 3y ago
> There's no big bad studios or MPAA between these typographers and the world taking the bulk of their money Where do fonts come from? Monotype, mostly https://thehustle.co/where-do-fonts-come-from/ https://thehustle.co/where-do-fonts-come-from/
- 23B1 3y ago
  Cool – use AI to build a free service that competes with Monotype.
Grae 3y ago
The author agrees with you. They're saying that the lack of legal protection for fonts is a problem, and that creating an opportunity to challenge that law would be a good thing. Courts can only weigh in on legal issues when people bring a dispute before the court. In this case, if someone did what the author describes it would trigger a lawsuit from typographers, which would give the court a chance to (re)interpret or overturn the existing law.
- manuelmoreale 3y ago
  I think the vast majority of typefaces can’t really have legal protection from a creative stand point because they’re so close to each other that it’s incredibly hard to argue that they’re original content. Just compare Inter vs Roboto vs San Francisco. Are they different? Technically yes. Are they different enough to allow for all three to be granted legal protection? I’d say no. And if you say yes, then it comes down to how different is different enough and the entire field becomes a legal nightmare

nrjames 3y ago

Sounds quite a lot like "They're just PNGs on the Internet. Why would you pay for that when you can just copy it for free?" The article is interesting from a technical point of view but feels yucky from a fairness point of view, regardless of legality. I may not have a ton of respect for the large corporation that owns the copyright on the file, but I do have respect for the creatives who make fonts (and other things) for a living.

dzek69 3y ago
The author of the article claims to not actually support piracy and ask to support the font makers. But from a technical point of view it's still somehow interesting It's like learning about some security tools like shodan - here is how you can mess something up, but don't do it
codedokode 3y ago
Big corporations shamelessly digitize old fonts and claim copyright, take Microsoft as an example [1]. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/ru-ru/typography/font-list/bookman-old-style https://learn.microsoft.com/ru-ru/typography/font-list/bookm...
denton-scratch 3y ago
TFA's author is arguing that it seems to be possible to do this, but as a font-author he finds it disreputable (you have to read to the end). He's arguing, I think, that fonts only became copyrightable when font files came along, with the arrival of PCs with GUIs. And that what became copyrightable was a font file. He argues that this is a weird anomaly; and I agree. But I draw a different conclusion; the introduction of copyright on font files was seriously annoying to me at the dawn of the PC age, because fonts were among the first digital objects that were copyrightable (that I had access to). With the exception of fonts, I could copy and re-purpose anything I found. I suspect fonts may have been the battering ram that led to the present situation of copyright maximalism. I don't mean to talk down the effort, judgement and skill that goes into creating a typeface; but I've never had much time for maximalists. I'd go back to author's lifetime, and I wouldn't allow immortal "persons" (corporations) to have copyrights.

bloqs 3y ago

Does anyone understand how this law works in the UK?

gnufx 3y ago
The legislation is https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/part/I/chapter/III/crossheading/typefaces https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/part/I/chapter/... Long ago I had to read the Act on microfiche.

ugh123 3y ago

Great info! I waded into this territory recently when trying to find a font that I can re-distribute as a system font for a device i'm building. Apparently this is completely restricted and disallowed according to pretty much every commercial license i've read from a long list of font shop sites. Instead, the intended use as spelled out in their commercial licenses boils down to the font buyer using it only to render graphics for printing or some other artistic use, rather than a "mechanical" use such as mine. Even after contacting some of them, they're unwilling to budge. After reading your post, I suspect one issue may be that some (many?) of the fonts sold on these sites are already pirated, and the site wants to protect itself from the only real copyright/legal threat of redistribution of the digital file. I've also found that many font authors don't even intend their fonts to be used as system/pc fonts. But rather something that can be imported into Adobe Illustrator (or the like) for further design work for print and graphic images - many of the font files themselves typically only contain A-Za-z letters (sometimes only capitals!), sometimes not even numbers, and only a few common punctuation characters.

mschuster91 3y ago
At that point, I'd go for one of the many legitimately open source fonts, some of which have been released into public domain [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_Unicode_typefaces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_Unicode_typefaces

pbhjpbhj 3y ago

Couple of issues I spotted: >most type foundries protect their fonts by copyrighting the font files themselves Copyright is applied at the point of creation of a work, so unless they're in jurisdictions with no copyright law then they all acquire copyright on their font files. >Since you’re entering into a legal agreement with the type foundry themselves, they can put whatever limits on how you can use the font, regardless of local copyright law. You can't normally disclaim obligations or rights provided by law unless explicitly allowed to do so. For example, in most jurisdictions you can make copies to aid creation of a tool for blind people (cf Marrakesh Treaty), so copying to feed into an ML algorithm to improve a text(image)-to-speech tool may be allowed even if the company put in their terms "no unauthorised storage on a computing system or in a database". An interesting example of this is attempting to put work "into the public domain" depending on jurisdiction you might not be able to do that before the copyright expires 'naturally'. these are my opinions only and do not relate to my employment

trogdor 3y ago
>Copyright is applied at the point of creation of a work, so unless they're in jurisdictions with no copyright law then they all acquire copyright on their font files. Yes, but in the United States, copyright registration is a prerequisite for copyright litigation. According to 17 U. S. C. §411(a), “no civil action for infringement of the copyright in any United States work shall be instituted until . . . registration of the copyright claim has been made in accordance with this title.” The Supreme Court addressed this head-on in Fourth Estate v. Wall Street. See: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2018/17-571 https://www.oyez.org/cases/2018/17-571
- bragr 3y ago
  >no civil action for infringement of the copyright in any United States work... It's not a US work if it wasn't made in the US. That's the crux of the point you're replying to
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  Assuming your summation to be true, then that is really interesting as it breaks USA's obligations under the Berne Convention (which they didn't join until about 100 years after most of the West) which was the reason registration was ended as a requirement (but was still useful due to, AIUI, pecuniary damages being awarded for registered works whilst only actual damages are/were? awarded for unregistered). I think you have erred, the question before the court concerned when registration bites. My understanding is 17 USC 106 still applies, but civil actions before the court require a registration to have been initiated; I thought that was just a filter on court actions? Happy to be corrected. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/411 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/411 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106 https://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/ https://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/

dzek69 3y ago

I have no problem with fonts pricing I have problem with the crazy licensing Yes, you can use that font, but only for print and websites and your website cannot generate more than 100k views monthly and your business annual revenue can be higher than 1m If you don't pass these we have more licensing options with different numbers and prices. if you want an app (is WebView in an APK file an app? Is PWA an app?) there is separate price as well You can host the font file on your server (browser must obviously download it) but you cannot actually distribute it - whatever that means, it could be risky with open source apps for example This is so bullshit I prefer to always use Google fonts or any other source of 100% free for anything fonts. You don't want my money - sure, your choice

neontomo 3y ago
Yeah, even with stock image platforms, having different licenses on every photo becomes a research project if you are working with any great amount of photos. I much prefer it when the websites have a standard license that is applicable to everything on there, because I only have to read it once. Also, if I can't use a resource I paid for in commercial use, it's pretty, but pretty useless.
- gnopgnip 3y ago
  With stock images there is really only one question, commercial use or editorial use. This distinction is more often about the subject than any decision made by the photographer or platform. Like a photo of any famous person is going to be editorial, unless you get the subject's permission. The license will be royalty free on even the cheapest microstock services
Macha 3y ago
This is also why so many tech companies invent their own fonts to avoid the whole licensing quagmires.
- Spivak 3y ago
  Plus if you have someone just hanging around who's a font nerd it's fun, saves money, gives you fodder for the marketing machine, and you get a more distinct brand with your company's "handwriting." It's not actually that hard to make your own font -- like you have to try to make an actively bad font. And since the value-add is mostly character I'm shocked how much people who license fonts jerk you around.

phyzome 3y ago

Tell me more about "legal piracy".

Tao3300 3y ago
> legal piracy I'm going to need to see a valid letter of marque!
ddingus 3y ago
I believe the thing we are looking for is legal infringement. Rights holder would rather not have something happen, but it is allowed to happen anyway, despite technically being infringing.

aiunboxed 3y ago

It reminds me of how there was a dispute of X's logo being taken from a mono type font https://www.ft.com/content/da262b2a-f39a-466b-9b2f-2f8fa84f0117 https://www.ft.com/content/da262b2a-f39a-466b-9b2f-2f8fa84f0...

LoganDark 3y ago
Do you have a non-paywalled link?

phendrenad2 3y ago

So which is it? Piracy? Or legal? It can't be both...

RobotToaster 3y ago

This doesn't account for optional ligatures in OTF fonts. I think it may not work on svg-otf fonts, since they can have colour, line thickness, etc.

gwern 3y ago
Why wouldn't the ligatures show up in images online? Someone's going to screenshot the alternatives at some point - the specimen, if nothing else. (And if they never show up and so can't be traced, then they couldn't've been all that important.)

K2L8M11N2 3y ago

I think this essay is relevant here: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 > Suppose you publish an article that happens to contain a sentence identical to one from this article, like "The law sees Colour." That's just four words, all of them common, and it might well occur by random chance. Maybe you were thinking about similar ideas to mine and happened to put the words together in a similar way. If so, fine. But maybe you wrote "your" article by cutting and pasting from "mine" - in that case, the words have the Colour that obligates you to follow quotation procedures and worry about "derivative work" status under copyright law and so on. Exactly the same words - represented on a computer by the same bits - can vary in Colour and have differing consequences. When you use those words without quotation marks, either you're an author or a plagiarist depending on where you got them, even though they are the same words. It matters where the bits came from.

jibbit 3y ago
this is a basic misunderstanding of copyright
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  Is the GP misunderstanding copyright, or is GP describing a common basic misunderstanding? If the former, could you please elaborate? I also frequently cite this article in discussions.

jejeyyy77 3y ago

just automate running through StableDiffusion and generate a slight variation. Done.

JW_00000 3y ago
If you give StableDiffusion a copyrighted work and ask it to generate a slight variation, the output will still be a derivative work.
- jejeyyy77 3y ago
  Remains to be seen

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

deleted 3y ago
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r3trohack3r 3y ago

Fun to think about, have personally gone down this rabbit hole before, but I'd be surprised if this was permitted by courts. > The key point here is that the shape of the glyphs themselves, for example, non-trademarked text posted on advertisements or products with printed text, are not copyrightable. So long as you’re not stealing the creative work, like the advertisement, itself, the shape of each letter is in the public domain. There is a jump from this assertion to: > This got me thinking, as all things do, on whether I could simply scrape the internet for public, non-creative, non-trademarked use of fonts The missing step here is that the glyphs for a webpage are not embedded in some sort of rendered image or physical medium. They're _rendered from the copyrighted font file_ to the browser. The font file is delivered to the browser and that copyrighted file is used to render the glyphs. This pipeline might work for creating a font that is "inspired by" the available glyphs rendered in the credits of your favorite film. But downloading the entire copyrighted font file, generating a character sheet from it and clipping the individual characters from that sheet? I can't imagine how any sensible court system would not consider that a derivative work.

abirch 3y ago
I believe he's downloading png files from Meta, converting them to SVG, then creating the glyphs. I'm not sure what the law is on this, but there's no need for the font files to ever be on your computer. E.g., https://render.myfonts.net/fonts/font_rend.php?id=a6719376b92bdadcac7abeed4363c796&rt=HackerNews https://render.myfonts.net/fonts/font_rend.php?id=a6719376b9...
- codedokode 3y ago
  Microsoft does exactly this with 19th and 18th century fonts, for example [1]. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/ru-ru/typography/font-list/baskerville-old-face https://learn.microsoft.com/ru-ru/typography/font-list/baske...
  - tuukkah 3y ago
    Those are probably in public domain because of their age though.

miragecraft 3y ago

Aside from the fact that I’m not a fan of piracy, you can’t claim something is legal when there’s a lot of wiggle room. What it comes down to is what you can legally prove in court and that means having big foundries sue you and having to defend yourself. Nobody wants to go through that just to use some fonts when there are open fonts available. If you want something custom then pick a variable font, such as Roboto Flex, and customize it beyond recognition. In fact that’s where I see the future is headed - “master” variable fonts with all the axis, variant glyphs etc. available to be tweaked. The user then gets to play with dials and knobs and when satisfied recompile the font to be non-variable in order to shave down the file size.

codedokode 3y ago
Big foundries digitize old fonts and claim copyright on them. Take Microsoft as an example, who took 19th century font and sells it [1] [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/ru-ru/typography/font-list/bookman-old-style https://learn.microsoft.com/ru-ru/typography/font-list/bookm...
- miragecraft 3y ago
  You're free to make competing digitized fonts using the same source material.

sigzero 3y ago

"legally pirate" is an oxymoron.

analyte123 3y ago

The legal term for the glyphs is "typeface" [1]. Last time I looked at this, it also implied that emoji images that are used in a font, for example Apple's emojis, were potentially not copyrightable either, at least when used as text [2] (and not for example, as a UI element or by themselves on a t-shirt). I recall that at the time, Telegram had completely copied Apple's emoji images into their own font, but I'm not sure if they still do. [1] https://nwalsh.com/comp.fonts/FAQ/cf_13.htm https://nwalsh.com/comp.fonts/FAQ/cf_13.htm [2] https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=2ae2643d-f307-4521-8a85-9290b92464e4 https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=2ae2643d-f307...

tasuki 3y ago

> a project that begged for a better, licensed font Eh. There are plenty of good fonts with permissive licensees. Also, good typography is much more about sizing and spacing than about picking a better font.

sleepybrett 3y ago

Farming the internet for kerning values is going to be a bit of a crapshoot. Many designers don't just type a headline and export to png, often kerning is manually adjusted (especially with headlines, but also during book-type layout kerning may be adjusted on whole blocks of text or just a few words in order to help balance a page or block)

Animats 3y ago

The next step should be a machine learning system which looks at samples of a font, learns what the font looks like, and then can generate characters in that style it hasn't seen, based on a large training set of other fonts. This would be useful when you want to fill out a font that doesn't have all the characters you need.

raylad 3y ago

This process still won't get the hinting that allows fonts to look good at many different sizes.

naet 3y ago

"Final reminder that I’m not a lawyer and have no clue if anything I said is actually correct, so none of this is legal advice and I strongly recommend you go talk to a lawyer before attempting anything here. I’d also strongly emphasize the importance of supporting the incredible work behind your favorite typefaces by purchasing fonts directly, I definitely do not advocate ever for stealing anyone’s work." The project is fun and a cool idea, but don't take the headline at face value. Would something like this hold up in court? My guess is that it probably won't. If a lawyer can demonstrate that you've perfectly recreated a copyright font I'm guessing a fair number of judges or juries would find you in violation of copyright regardless of the method used to make the recreation. Either way you're opening yourself up to a potentially expensive legal headache if discovered.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

hwc 3y ago

if the nocopy flag is set on a font, Chrome will not embed that font into a PDF when you do "print to PDF". instead, the shapes are used to create a type3 font. This is a way the author can get the vector shape of the glyphs without touching the TTF files. (or that was true back when I worked on that code, two jobs back!)

postmodest 3y ago

I have fonts installed on my computer that I received from a boxed CorelDraw! Install in probably 1993. These have names like "Swiss721" and were created by Bitstream as visual clones of Helvetica or Times. Visual cloning of fonts is technically legal and has a long standing tradition. But "While technically not illegal, font designer John Hudson would describe its selling of large numbers of typefaces on CD at discount prices as "one of the worst instances of piracy in the history of type"."

Guvante 3y ago

Doubtful the courts would allow this shell game. Just because a particular usage is not protected doesn't mean you can do anything with it.

steakscience 3y ago

You also cannot copyright recipes

DiabloD3 3y ago

I love how he uses the Berkeley Graphics license as an example, yet ignores the fact that you buy their font, Berkeley Mono, because you want a very well engineered font. Like, there are straight up only two fonts I will say are engineered well, objectively: Berkeley Mono is the #2 on that list, PragmataPro being #1. It isn't about aesthetic quality, its down to how well hinted they are, and how well they render at absurdly small sizes on a wide range of renderers.

k310 3y ago

I am getting a 404 Thursday Oct 12 at 7:45 Pacific. Long story short, it's not at his blog, nor at his notion. The wayback machine has it at: https://web.archive.org/web/20231012051743/https://blog.willdepue.com/how-to-legally-pirate-all-fonts-in-an-afternoon https://web.archive.org/web/20231012051743/https://blog.will... There were 14 captures yesterday and today and no more, it seems. I remember when life was simpler. Last week. Cheers

m0d0nne11 3y ago

Oooops! that page may now have been taken down...