There's a lot of text that isn't covered under copyright at all. It would be a circus if widely published content that isn't eligible for copyright was illegal to photocopy because it was printed in a typeface that was.

For example, the IRS official fonts are Helvetica and Times New Roman. If in a hypothetical world, those were eligible for copyright, they'd still be within the duration of eligibility. Would it then be a copyright violation to print my tax form? I think that's silly, and I think the lawmakers who decided this thought the same.

> For example, the IRS official fonts are Helvetica and Times New Roman. If in a hypothetical world, those were eligible for copyright, they'd still be within the duration of eligibility. Would it then be a copyright violation to print my tax form? I think that's silly, and I think the lawmakers who decided this thought the same.

That's a weird hypothetical. Obviously, in that counterfactual world, the IRS would choose fonts that were either in the public domain or had permissive licenses.

Your hypothetical sounds like if speed limits on the highway were lowered, everyone would drive at the old speed and get a ticket, instead of adjusting their behaviour.

> Obviously, in that counterfactual world, the IRS would choose fonts that were either in the public domain or had permissive licenses.

there's nothing obvious about that at all; there are plenty of times when government agencies don't bend over backwards like that to ensure public access to their public-domain products. remember that what the fbi first investigated aaron swartz for was providing public access to pacer's court electronic records; pacer nominally stands for 'public access to court electronic records'

the westlaw page number fiasco is another example

you could even imagine a government rfq where different font foundries offer the irs the use of their fonts for below-market prices, thus gaining the right to charge people for printing their tax forms. and if you think that's an implausible level of corruption you probably haven't been following the ongoing saga of intuit's lobbying

Of course, one can always imagine suitably horrible levels of corruption / cronyism to make almost everything bad.

yeah, and fortunately congress did, and included safeguards against them

You're right, it's a backwards hypothetical.

> the IRS would choose fonts that were either in the public domain or had permissive licenses.

Presuming a suitable option existed at the time, without requiring the IRS to make one themselves.

It would be silly if, by default, the purchaser of a printing press has no legal right to print anything with it.

Printing presses are older than (most) copyright laws.

Yes, and they still existed when those laws were written. It would have been a strange shift to make overnight for any new printing presses, no?

Well, before those laws you could presumably copy anything, and after that you had to get the author's permission.

(I say presumably, because most likely those laws replaced some earlier similar regulations.)

if it's fair use; that may or may not cover every case of 'xerox a book for private use' but certainly the publishers who are suing library genesis under us law don't think it does