A typeface design, in the U.S., no, but the digital font file comprising outline data and instructions, according to current U.S. law, for an overview of current case law and a proposal see:

https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/chtlj/vol10/iss1/5/

There's no evidence XBAND Rough was extracted from a digital source bit-for-bit, unless someone can point to any?

It seems like it was just a hobbyist project to recreate the look of the font from the anti-piracy ads. Which is 100% legal.

Idk if it's provable how it was recreated but if you type in "XBAND Rough" into the sampler box at the bottom of the page https://www.myfonts.com/collections/ff-confidential-font-fon... and compare to https://fontzone.net/font-details/xband-rough it's exactly the same and the letter splotching is very distinct in the lower case letters.

If I were going to knock it off I'd duplicate the splotching exactly, too. I'd prepare as sample as a bitmap, use any of the various raster-to-vector tracers on it to get an SVG, clean up the SVG of any conversion artifacts, then make it into a type format. (Heck, there's probably a fun problem in here to train an algorithm to do the cleanup and conversion. You could probably knock-off the hinting and ligatures, too.)

"It looks the same" is completely different than having been directly extracted from digital source.

If the digital source is the only thing that can be copyrighted, then you have to prove the digital source is what was used inappropriately. If you can't prove that, either because it didn't happen or because there's no technological way to prove it, then you can't prove copyright infringement.

Ages ago, I consulted on a case where a converted font was included in a product --- it was even simpler than https://luc.devroye.org/kinch.html since no transformations were applied --- just had to figure out which version of which font editor was used to open up the font file and then which settings were used to re-generate the font in the new format used for the infringing product.

I'm not saying it's never possible in any case, just that in cases where it's not you can't prove infringement.

If a digital font file is used as a source, it's probably too much work for the thief to erase all traces of that --- whether or no it should be acceptable to re-create a typeface design w/o crediting the original designer and adhering to their intent in terms of licensing and distribution is a different discussion.

XBAND Rough could not have been inspired by those ads, as the OP shows the ads are using XBAND, and not FF Confidential, the original tyepface it cloned.

We don’t know what the ads (meaning, the videos) used. We only know what was on their website.

In this case it seems like what happened was:

1. Catapult Entertainment made/commissioned XBAND Rough as a clone of Confidential for their use somewhere (promotional materials, PC software, who knows?). The font file contains the text "Copyright 1996 Catapult Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved".

2. The "You wouldn't steal a car" campaign pirated Catapult's copyrighted font file. I think they got away with it because Catapult was no longer in business at that point. They were acquired by Mpath Interactive in 1996 and Mpath's IP got acquired by GameSpy in 2000.

If it were the same file, it wouldn't be a "knock-off." It would be something like Optifonts. Very frowned upon, but definitely not illegal. Also, the kerning is usually trash, there will be way too many nodes in the vectors, and things may be missing. Annoying to work with, but in the case of Optifonts, free (because they're long out of business.)

http://abfonts.freehostia.com/opti/

https://luc.devroye.org/fonts-27506.html

They absolutely are copyrighted and big money.

In the US you can't copyright the shape of a font. You can copyright the programmatic description of a font.

Design patents have been awarded for fonts. Trademark and trade dress protections could apply to the specific use of a font but not the font itself. The name of a font itself can be protected by trademark, as well.

It's kind of a fascinating topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...

Edit: Back in the mid-90s versions of Corel Draw came with a Truetype editor. A friend of mine made "knock off" versions of fonts they liked from magazines, etc, and made them freely available on his ISP-provided web space.

Over the years they got some angry messages from a few "type people" who didn't like that they'd made freely available knock-offs of various fonts. (I remember that "Keedy Sans" is one they knocked-off and got a particularly angry email about.)

Further aside: My fiend made a sans serif typeface that has a distinct pattern of "erosion" at the edges and voids within the letters. It's easy to tell when it's the font he made. For the last 30 years I've kept samples of the various places I've seen it used, both on the Internet and on physical articles. I find it so amazing that a TTF file made by a kid in Corel Draw in 1994 or 1995 ended up being used in advertisements, on packaging, etc.

But you can Copyright the Name of a font. But yes long standing rule says you can copyright how letters & numbers look. Note that if you make a font that contains your own “artwork’ that does not represent a letter or number you can get protection for that.

And only fairly recently (in the past 30 years—I forget when Adobe won this court case) the courts ruled you can protect the code for generating a fonts look from being copied.

You can't copyright the name of a font in the US. You can trademark it.

In the 90s Corel Draw came with a Helvetica named Swiss. Microsoft wasn't as bold and called theirs Arial.

Corel's "Swiss" font is identical to Helvetica. Arial has many differences.

> In the US you can't copyright the shape of a font. You can copyright the programmatic description of a font.

The organization in question is a UK organization, and you can in fact copyright a font in the UK. The US is unrelated to this issue.

You can, entirely legally, make a copy of any font and distribute it freely.

You can't copy the font files themselves, but you can make visually indistinguishable new fonts with the same shapes because the shapes are not protected by copyright.

Additionally though, some fonts have design patents, which does protect the shape. Unlike copyright which has absolutely crazy expiration (like 150 years occasionally?) these patents only cover 15 to 20 years or shorter if abandoned.

An example of Apple patenting a font valid 2017 to 2032: https://patents.google.com/patent/USD786338S1/en

So if I already have the file (legally acquired or not), I'm free to use it for print? Cause obviously distributing T-shirts isn't distributing font files?

In the US, yes.

It depends on if it has a design patent on it or not.

Maybe not in the US, but fonts do enjoy copyright protection in at least some European markets.[1] I frequently encountered this campaign on DVDs for rent in the local Blockbuster equivalents, so I don't think it is entirely theoretical infringement, either.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti... and forward

FACT/FAST are a UK organisation, where font copyright is espressly enumerated in the copyright law.

"You wouldn't copyright a font"

You can copyright just about anything as long as you have the _money_

T-Mobile trademarked a very specific pink, "Magenta"

There’s even a company that holds trademarks on a set of colors, Pantone.

Courts have yet to reverse or revoke these silly trademarks.

Trademark and copyright are not the same thing..

Trademark != copyright.

T-Mobile does not have a trademark on the color magenta, nor does Pantone on any colors.

The trademark is for using that color to market your product such that a buyer might assume they are buying T-mobile, but in reality they are not.

Or for Pantone, that a buyer is buying a color quality controlled by Pantone.