Was it effectively a bad move ?

But there's of course also the whole "Your honor, as the evidence makes plain, this content/communication is claimed to have originated on Twitter, but does not use our official typeface. We move to dismiss this case/be awarded damages based on the fact that we were not part of this particular incident", paired with "Your honor, as the evidence makes plain, this content uses our proprietary font, but did not originate at twitter. We move to dismiss this case because we were not involved/be awarded damages on the basis us defamation and will be filing a counter-suit for impersonation".

Do you have real-world examples of the hypothetical you invented?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/not-for-the-firs...

It's always more economical for a company of Twitter's size to develop their own font because 1) Then they don't have to pay per-use licensing fees, which are huge at the billion user scale, and 2) a peculiarity of copyright law means that the actual shapes of the letters aren't actually protectable by copyright -- you can copy an existing font virtually 100%, tweak a thing or two, and legally call it your own.

If they're just specifying a font (e.g. 'Helvetica') in their CSS, it's loaded from the users' machine and doesn't cost anything.

Otherwise every site on the internet would be paying fees for fonts.

I could be wrong. Please inform me if I am.

IANAL but this is only true in some jurisdictions, primarily the US and Japan.

Also, I don’t think it’s quite that simple either. The actual type face may not be eligible for copyright, but the computer code describing the particular curves and hinting rules and etc. is. So I think you can’t just trivially copy a font and modify it and call it your own.

Warning: offer not applicable in UK and most countries in EEA. They have the concept of protecting designs there. Japan excludes most designs of fonts because of its utilitarian use BUT if the font (technically typeface) is distinctive and used in a way that can be defended as an artistic choice, it's protected under copyright.

Maybe Office 365 needs to be conservative with fonts. Twitter can push boundaries, though. I wish they'd push boundaries more, ala Bertone or Memphis Group, but I guess the risks are larger the more you push the boundaries.

What's the difference between Office and Twitter here? Both are apps that should just get out of the way of the content.

Most software should just have native UI that follows the platform guidelines. Unfortunately software companies hire graphic designers who know nothing about interaction design, and generalist programmers who want to do one-size-fits-all UIs. And that's how you get unreadable fonts in slow Electron apps.

Different presentation fonts in web pages, desktops, etc. can start to have the experiential impact of (gui) skins, or non-standard dotfiles.

Please note the things I'm leaving out of this... print, books, static things, etc.

https://twitter.com/Twitter is 1.6mb. (200k+ of fonts, 500k+ of JS)