You wouldn't steal a font
(fedi.rib.gay)1320 points by todsacerdoti a day ago
1320 points by todsacerdoti a day ago
I remember trying to explain to some colleagues why I paid about 100 bucks for the font I use and why I wouldn’t share it with them and they just couldn’t get it.
(It’s Berkeley mono).
I don’t even know how many glyphs it is (it’s thousands) but for something I’m looking at for 6-8 hours a day, every single day and is the absolute peak of perfection (at least to me), 100 bucks seems like a fucking bargain to me.
shrug I guess these folks never sold something they made completely by themselves maybe.
>shrug I guess these folks never sold something they made completely by themselves maybe.
Not saying font designers shouldn't get paid, but they mostly aren't making things "completely by themselves", they are mostly making derivative works from things that exist, without any consideration for the original authors.
The "peak of perfection" does not support even just European languages, not having full coverage even for Latin scripts. But it's a "love letter for the golden age of computing", and the golden age had massive problems with scripts for languages other than English, so maybe it's intentional.
https://usgraphics.com/static/products/TX-02/datasheet/TX-02...
Hey, Berkeley Mono supports most Western European languages, can you tell me what's missing? I can add it. Btw, the tagline is about the aesthetics. :)
Pretty much anyone coding in another language. Coders do sometimes buy fonts if they are into fonts and nice terminals.
> shrug I guess these folks never sold something they made completely by themselves maybe
Ignoring that they likely didn’t make it completely by themselves (standing on the shoulders of giants and such), it’s quite possible that those people don’t believe that a file should cost money. I’ve made a few things as close to “completely by myself” as possible and given them away for free, and those were physical objects - I lose it when I give it away! I have absolutely no problem giving away 1s and 0s for free, I can make as many copies of the original as I want with no additional effort.
Of course we don’t live in a world where everyone can follow their passions without needing money in return for sharing the result with the world, so it’s fully understandable people want to sell their art. It’s disingenuous and reductive to assume that anyone who doesn’t want to pay for art has never made anything completely by themselves, though.
Same for me, same font, same logic. The author put a lot of hands-on work into making something I stare at all day long. I even just bought a license for a friend for his birthday because I love it.
But I'm not sharing my copy with anyone else. This isn't insulin or something. They'll be just fine without it.
> Berkeley Mono
Link for the lazy https://neil.computer/notes/berkeley-mono-font-variant-popul...
And ofc there was a HN discussion;
Never really considered it, but taking a quick glance: yes, I'd pay $100 for that too, especially as my main font for programming interface.
I've made a couple of fonts. Very bad ones. I know firsthand they absolutely take creativity and tradecraft.
A well made font, from an artistic perspective, is a thing of beauty-- particularly when it incorporates subtle visual themes and nuances. It's definitely more than just "drawing the alphabet". There are also metric ass-tons of glyphs necessary to make a usable font.
Likewise, a properly hinted digital font file, especially with little touches like ligatures, is also a thing of utilitarian beauty. It's a ton of work to get that right.
That the shapes of fonts can't be protected by copyright isn't a new idea. Anybody who makes a font today should know that going in. I wouldn't make a font with the expectation of getting paid outside of doing it for a specific commission. Doing it "for the love" and expecting to get paid seems like a losing business proposition.
>What saddens me is that a lot of people are so ignorant that they don't even realize a font is something that takes creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort to design.
Except most of the creative part was done 100 years ago and companies are now trying to protect the fact that they digitized something that has existed for a century or longer.
It's not about ignorance. There are so many things you interact with every day that take "creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort" that it's impossible to be aware of the details of each one. At some point you just have to abstract that stuff away and go on with your day.
No kidding. As part of a mapping project I worked on, I created a set of 200+ custom SVG icons. I used Inkscape and hand-drew most of the shapes or modified existing glyphs from icon fonts or other raw vector graphic sources. This took months of work and planning, and I even figured out how to use Inkscape’s batch scripting API to automate some things. It was one of the most tedious things I’ve worked on and I am very proud of it. And as far as I know, it’s still in use today by the customer.
I think it is perhaps important to realise that while what you say is true, that is not what is protected by copyright. As others have said in these comments, if the font had been copied using the digital data then it may be a copyright infringement, but if the duplicate font had been constructed from scratch to be a visually identical font then it may not be a copyright infringement.
>> What saddens me is that a lot of people are so ignorant that they don't even realize a font is something that takes creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort to design.
I get that an average computer user who just views content might not. But as soon as you start creating stuff and even searching for and downloading a font you like I'd think some kind of mental bell would ring like "oh, these are a thing. Like some type of commodity."
The problem is that there are so many free fonts that most people take them for granted. And honestly, I don't blame most folks for thinking that way because there isn't a good reason for the average person to pay for a font. If you're just making wedding invites or signage for an event or some other one-off thing, you probably don't care.
If you're a professional using them in your work, that's an entirely different story, and you are significantly more likely to appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into making them.
TIL: font designs are not copyrightable in the USA. Font files are but the design itself is not. It seems you are free to copy the design, but not the file. Not sure how that plays out in practice. Is it common to copy a font design or is it just more common to be inspired by a font design but make a new font that's in the same general design space? Like say Arial seems inspired by Helvetica but is not the same.
There are definitely fonts that are nearly identical copies, e.g. Palladio is a clone of Palatino (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatino#Free_and_open-source_...)
Also the creator of Gill Sans—Eric Gill—sexually abused his children and dog. Licensing aside I wouldn’t touch this font with a 12 foot pole
I know we don't really do humor on HN, but working in the car industry, this comedic Aussie rebuttal always amused me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fb7N-JtQWGI
It's also one of the funniest scenes of The IT Crowd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg
I spent some time last weekend playing with LLMs and SVGs- it turns out SVG is a domain specific language and LLMs know how to use it. I was able to get an LLM (grok from X.ai) to author SVGs from a description of what I wanted it to look like, and to modify existing SVG text to customize files that weren’t perfectly to my liking.
Fonts are also written in domain specific languages, I need to experiment with whether LLMs can author or modify fonts.
I do not think that the ridiculous terms that font and clip art and stock photo companies now offer, is going to be a viable business model in a couple of years.
We will all be able to use (for example) “LLM Helvetica Free” without any license.
You inspired me to attempt this and sadly GPT, Claude, and Gemini all said they didn’t have the software tools to do it. But as you mentioned, it can generate SVGs and those can be used to create a font.
I was curious who was behind this campaign - it has a wikipedia page (answer: FACT and MPAA):
A popular response
Very early in my design education (late 90's) I was taught that fonts are fonts and the more you have, the better you tool set would be. As a graphic designer I definitely made things with fonts I had downloaded. It wasn't till I got my first serious design job at an agency where I quickly learned about purchasing and licensing fonts. Even if I could "find" a missing font, I wasn't allowed to use it. We needed to get the fonts directly from the vendor we were working with and if they were being too slow, we ate the cost and purchased the font.
>> Either the service can detect you pulling a font for a domain that isn't paying for it...
Is that really a thing? Markup in a web page tells how to display the text. Saying "use this font over here on this other server" seems fair game on some level. Might not be on another level, but it's technically the end user downloading a file that's publicly available on some server.
AIUI the font vendor has a list of customers, each of whom are required to provide an exact list of the domains they will host it on and the domains they will display it on. So the crawlers, upon identifying a matching font, simply have to check that both the displaying and hosting domains match.
In the USA at least, contributory and vicarious infringement are a thing. Grokster knowingly directed their users to infringing material so they picked up secondary liability.
"Pulling a font for a domain"—wtf, isn't the client making the request? Why detect anything, just require a referrer on your allow-list, and deny if it's not there.
An allow-list would probably suck for local development for users that do have a valid license.
It’s clearly not the same font (you can see visible differences between the letters), and therefore not pirated. The appearance of a typeface can’t be copyrighted in the US - only the digital instructions used to render them (e.g. if someone visually inspects a font and clones it that is perfectly alright, as long as they don’t directly copy from and adapt the underlying font file).
The moral background for copyright is in free fall these days.
It is quickly turning into one of these things that there are laws for, and everyone thinks it is rediculous, it is never enforced and DE facto not a law.
And what a shame that is.
Copyright, and patents, are not based on moral principles. It's a temporary government license meant to encourage innovation and hustle. Whether it works or not, I don't know. But the only question of morality is if it's immoral to break an arbitrary law, or not.
This is strongly jurisdiction-dependent.
US patent and copyright derive from A1S8C8 of the US constitution, "to promote science and useful arts".
Much EU law derives from a French tradition based on droight d'auteur, or moral rights.
International copyright code (Berne Convention) rips and mashes from both traditions.
I'd agree with this.
The point I was addressing was whether or not copyright is grounded in moral rights, and as my earlier response notes, it depends on jurisdiction and foundations.
That said, I've come to a general view that moralising of pathologies or other behaviours is often highly counterproductive. Medicine progressed little when illness, disease, or dysfunction were rationalised as will of gods or divine retribution. Germ theory and other causal etiologies broke that dam. Left-handedness was widely viewed as literally malevolent, a sign of the devil. Which did little to prevent the condition, and greatly hampered opportunities and life-paths of the roughly 10% of the population which is left handed. Oppression of LGBTQIX+ individuals is often presented as a similar situation. Mental health and illness still carry strong moralising-of-pathology overtones, though the situation's improving. Justice and penal systems are presented by some as another such case (see in particular Robert Sapolsky).
Back to copyright and patent: both foundations, authorial/inventor support and moral rights strike me as grossly flawed in both grounding and consequence.
Copyright has always been based on moral principles. 'Moral rights' have been part of copyright longer than "encourage innovation and hustle" has been something the government has considered worth promoting. The original copyright laws were about controlling who could print the bible, and the statute of anne was about encouraging learning while controlling what booksellers could and couldn't do. Copyright if anything was about preventing innovation from the very beginning, and slowing the hustle of culture down so that incumbents could edge out newcomers - a drama that has played out generation after generation
All abstract property rights are legal fiction. The notion that you can own, say, a piece of land that you have never even came close to, simply by virtue of a record in some registry somewhere; and, based on that ownership, then restrict the ability of others who actually do live next to it to enter it or otherwise use it, is rather absurd from a "natural right" perspective.
I should note that this isn't even some kind of hot new take. Here's what Thomas Jefferson had to say on the subject:
"It is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all... It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society."
"A right of property in moveable things is admitted before the establishment of government. A separate property in lands, not till after that establishment. The right to moveables is acknowledged by all the hordes of Indians surrounding us. Yet by no one of them has a separate property in lands been yielded to individuals. He who plants a field keeps possession till he has gathered the produce, after which one has as good a right as another to occupy it. Government must be established and laws provided, before lands can be separately appropriated, and their owner protected in his possession. Till then, the property is in the body of the nation, and they, or their chief as trustee, must grant them to individuals, and determine the conditions of the grant."
Just because it’s a fiction doesn’t meant it’s not effective in triggering human responses and proactive actions. In a broad sense, fiction is all we get as human minds, whether it’s representative representation of our actual embedding universe or not.
That would in fact be part of my argument.
Some fictions are readily dispensible. Most are not.
What they are not however is laws of nature, divine right or revelation, or immutable.
Limit on the law-of-nature bit: law is often a highly probable outcome of various power dynamics, political, economic, social, cultural, etc.
Beware claims to moral rights / superiority. They're often a thought-stopping wedge to badness.
Copyright in the sense of corporate greed is indeed an issue.
Whenever talk about that being a shame, I am thinking about the individual author who lost control over their work and still can not feed themselves.
It's worth noting that the moral background (at least in terms of political philosophy in the US) was always rooted in practicalities. The Constitution even includes the qualifier "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." The moment a protection works against those goals, it's on shaky ground. And that ground is always in flux; there's a reason Thomas Jefferson noted regarding patents that "other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrasment than advantage to society."
This is why copyright is shot-through with exceptions (for example, we give broad leeway to infringement for educational purposes, for what benefit does society gain if protection of the intellectual property of this generation stunts the growth of creative faculties of the next?). And that's usually fine, until, say, a broadly-exceptioned process to gather and catalog art and expression worldwide available online that was fed into neural net training in academic settings for decades becomes something of a different moral quality when the only thing that's changed is instead of a grey-bearded professor overseeing the machine it's a grey-templed billionaire financier.
(I submit to the Grand Council of People Reading This Thread the possibility that one resolution to this apparent paradox is to consider that the actual moral stance is "It's not fair that someone might starve after working hard on a product of the mind while others benefit from their hard work," and that perhaps copyright is simply not the best tool to address that moral concern).
I don't have objections to the tool. My issues are with how much power we have assigned to that tool.
The right to claim renumeration for, and restrict use of, one's work should not IMO extend for multiple generations. I'm not sure it should even extend for one.
It's fresh takes like this that keep me coming back to HN, year after year.
As a matter of US law:
- Font letterforms are not copyrightable. (Eltra Corp. v. Ringer, 579 F.2d 294 (4th Cir. 1978) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eltra_Corp._v._Ringer>)
- Font programmes are. (Generally 1980 Computer Software Copyright Act.)
- Cleanroom reimplementation of software is not copyright infringement. An AI without access to original source code would likely pass this test.
- As a further twist, it appears likely that courts will hold that AI creations are themselves not copyrightable (original works of authorship), such that the product of any such project would itself be public domain. (See: <https://www.reuters.com/legal/ai-generated-art-cannot-receiv...>.)
The whole scenario appears to open the door to liberation of all fonts for which public letterforms are available. This would be an "AI hole" (analogous to the ... analogue hole) for escaping copyright. Whether this liberation would occur before foundries passed new protective legislation will be an interesting question.
That would be interesting to see. An a possible way of extending current typefaces through the Unicode glyph-space.
Thought I'd had earlier: there's a lot of detail that goes into font design, particularly anticipating issues with specific media.
E.g., faces meant for wet-ink print often incorporates features to avoid pooling or smearing ink ("ink traps", see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ink_trap>). Electrostatic printing (a/k/a laserprinters), and screen-based displays (CRT, LED, Plasma, eInk) also have idiosyncrasies which fine-detail font design may take into account.
I'm not sure those would be hugely significant, but seem a domain in which a naive AI font designer might prove deficient.
This comment section is precisely what I expected upon discovering this very funny anecdote regarding the irony and hypocrisy involved with the infamous anti-piracy advocacy of the late '90's/early '00s. Peak HN--didactic, humorless, and lost in its own takes about the absolute least relevant detail of the story: font licensing.
This sounds very critical, but I assure you, these are my people. I rather find it very reassuring, even a little charming.
Don't ever change HN.
Looks like the wikipedia page needs a bit of updating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Wouldn%27t_Steal_a_Car
>Powered by Iceshrimp
Sort of off-topic, but interesting engine, which I never heard about (wasn't ever mentioned on HN either: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Iceshrimp):
>Iceshrimp is a decentralized and federated social networking service, implementing the ActivityPub standard.
Iceshrimp, or at least this JavaScript version of it, is a fork of Misskey, which has been mentioned on HN a few times. If you've heard of Mastodon, Misskey and its forks participate in the same decentralized social network - Mastodon users can like and comment on the tweet-like posts that a Misskey user makes and vice-versa.
The Iceshrimp devs are also working on a "port" to .NET that's basically a brand new social media app, but with an upgrade path from the JavaScript version.
I also use Iceshrimp to self-host my own fediverse account and I think it's pretty good software. I think it has a better UI that Mastodon and it has some cutesy features that Mastodon lacks, like being able to emoji-react to posts.
Having worked in the graphic design industry during the 90's, no. There's no way I'd have just slipped a font I didn't own on a disk and sent it off to a printer. When it comes to fonts for coding... sure there was that ONE time I snagged Operator Mono for an extended "trial". I still believe in paying for things that I use on a daily basis, so I switched back to Sauce Code Pro or something.
What about stealing code from github, images from deviantart and pinterest, knowledge base from stackoverflow, etc, to train AI?
Can someone explain to me how you determine if a font is ripped/stolen?
I was under the impression that fonts are just a collection of line arc/points.
So is this a probabilistic comparison in that, if all of the line arc/points match another font - the chances are high it was ripped?
But was Xband created by copying the math from FF Confidential?
PDF is a famously (and hilariously) wild document format because it satisfied the need of being able to recreate a work piece faithfully using thousands of kinds of outputs, some of which didn't even exist when the document was created, to ideally arbitrary pixel resolution (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbCniw-BcW0 for a delightful and informative talk including this topic).
As a result, in one of the modes of PDF you can save the entire font file for every font used by the PDF into the PDF itself, just in case it's not present on the recipient's machine. Costly? Sure! But what else are you going to do if your document uses a super-special font for displaying mathematical symbols or sanskrit or the glyphs of a language understood by fifty people on the planet and Unicode isn't widely adopted yet, having been invented just two years before PDF?
So in this case, the author grabbed a copy of a PDF version of the ad (because those ads are still available online), cracked open the document itself, and found the glyphs for the letters are sourced from a version of the font that was intentionally created to steal someone else's font work because the whole font file is in the document.
>Sure! But what else are you going to do if your document uses a super-special font for displaying mathematical symbols or sanskrit or the glyphs of a language understood by fifty people on the planet and Unicode isn't widely adopted yet, having been invented just two years before PDF?
Assuming it's for print/display and not future editing, I imagine you could convert the font strokes to vectors or similar.
You could. But in a thousand page document, that's a lot of memory used up to record a vector for every letter 'c'. So of course you do two layers: record modifiers and transforms on a canonical 'c', and then keep a canonical 'c' somewhere with all the other letters.
... But you already have that data structure: it's the font file itself.
(Possibly worth noting here also is that historically, Adobe owned both the PDF format and the file format for most popular fonts. So they were heavily incentivized to just reuse code they already owned here instead of reinventing a wheel).
If you've seen a bunch of memes on 4chan and 8chan with TEFF Renard, Trinite, and/or Lexicon fonts, that was me.
Typefaces are not copyrightable but fonts are off, using a font with a knockoff typeface is not copyright infringement because it is not using the copyrighted font.
But... fonts aren't copyrightable. Was this a patented font?
here is a font stealing search query if anyone is interested. I used to have it as a custom search engine on chrome:
URL with %s in place of query: https://www.google.com/search?q=intitle%3A%22index.of%22+(tt...
Wife works in corp. legal. Just had to settle a demand for font licenses that the company front end used without approval. $40k.
Its a good gimmick if you can get it.
The concept of "piracy" and copyright is completely ridiculous. Real piracy involves stealing, destroying and killing, not copying numbers.
I never entered in a contract with you, producer of goods or innovation, you have no right to forbid me from copying anything.
You may prevent your own customers from facilitating access of non paying customers to their goods (by making them sign a contract) and even persecute them in a civil court (for breach of contract).
The fact that governments allow copyright owners to censor information on the internet to protect their commercial interest is just absolutely insane and incredibly damaging to the freedom of circulation of culture and ideas.
Off-topic, but with this ad I always think of the IT Crowd spoof
Relevant:
You wouldn't download a car
>https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/piracy-its-a-crime
Also be aware that some people actually consider the real PSA to be a Mandela effect since they consider "You wouldn't download a car" to be the "real, original" text of these PSAs, while in reality this was a popular parody/meme that was made out of the PSA:
> https://www.reddit.com/r/MandelaEffect/comments/113qibd/you_...
I am not registered with this private instance, but there is a comment that I want to reply to:
> This is so typical of people who are just doing a hatchet job for money but have no personal interest in the topic or skin in the game.
This is both true and incomplete. Advocates against piracy are time and again caught infringing on IP. I think about when Lily Allen stole the content of her anti-piracy screed "It's Not Alright" from Techdirt[0]:
> However, [...] the rest of the blog post – put there by Lilly herself – is someone else’s work. Arrr mateys, Long John Allen lifted the entire post from another site – Techdirt.com – effectively pirating the work of the one and only Mike Masnick.
> “I think it’s wonderful that Lilly Allen found so much value in our Techdirt post that she decided to copy — or should I say ‘pirate’? — the entire post,” Mike told TorrentFreak on hearing the shocking news.
The anti-piracy creators demand that we stay within their narrow definition of "piracy", which just so happens to exclude the work that they steal. Yes, the creative agency behind the "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" ad are disconnected from the cause. And their clients at the MPAA and FACT do not consider fonts to be worthy of the protections that are ostensibly the basis of their existence.
0: https://torrentfreak.com/file-sharing-heroine-lilly-allen-is...
There was a nice video on how you can't copyright a typeface recently by "Ok, so" over on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J06tluN7rtE
But you can copyright a font name, so if someone copies your work and releases it under a new name... that's that's like creating a copy of the car piece by piece and giving it your own name.
So they were right: we not downloading a car, we never were. We were all just making copies.
Edit: OK, the original post is extremely unclear.
To clarify: the original font is named "FF Confidential" (which the post doesn't even mention).
The seemingly illegal clone is called "XBAND Rough".
copying the visual is legal, copying the file is not — in this case it seems the clone is of the file AND therefore the appearance
Some of them even use those free fonts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ
I don’t think that’s productive. Best case response that I can imagine is piracy opponents pushing for some legislation mandating fonts with DRM.
Air quotes - “it’s obviously the fault of the person who cloned the font and the general public needs to be protected against such content” - end air quotes.
At the same time, it doesn’t have to be productive, it’s funny enough.
What saddens me is that a lot of people are so ignorant that they don't even realize a font is something that takes creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort to design.