Re:Font licensing is ill, please help heal it
by 2bitlobster on Friday September 03, 2021 @04:06PM
(#28408756)
Some interesting notes: professional font designers regularly copy each other's work. However, if you ask a legitimate font designer, they will trace another font. Where they get in hot water is if they copy and/or manipulate the actual Bezier points from another file (at which point they are copying the code). I remember going to a font design conference a long time ago, and some elite well known designers were aghast at another well known font designer for copying the bezier points directly off of another font and then manipulating the points from there. It's a crazy little dance they do to keep things legit.
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Re:Font licensing is ill, please help heal it
by randombits0 on Friday September 03, 2021 @05:45PM
(#28409777)
I’d like to suggest that if a “crazy little dance” is required to “keep things legit”, it’s not.
Re:Font licensing is ill, please help heal it
by httpsterio on Saturday September 04, 2021 @11:20AM
(#28415877)
If you use OCR to copy the entierty of a book and it became legit after doing so , I'd argue that the laws around that make little sense.
Re:Font licensing is ill, please help heal it
by randombits0 on Saturday September 04, 2021 @06:19PM
(#28419885)
I was only suggesting a failure in law. Merely scanning is not creative and not protected.
As for fonts specifically, while I am not qualified to describe creative elements versus prior art, I think we can all agree the the field of commonly used fonts is quite well within the realm of the public domain. Font foundries only exist to squeeze unearned profits from only minor and non-expressive additions to that that is already well within accepted public art for many hundreds of years. They are swindlers and con artists.