Comment by mchusma
Copyright for most (if not all) fonts seems like something that just shouldn’t work. We want things in the public domain, like Shakespeare, and we want derivative works protected. Fonts are tiny differences on public domain work that 90% of people can’t tell. You wouldn’t want Disney to claim every pencil stroke difference on Mikey’s to be subject to different copyright terms, it would become a kind of perpetual copyright strategy. If there are true technical improvements to the way we represent letters, they should be covered by patents, with their shorter terms.
How do you encourage people to continue making new typefaces if anyone could use them immediately? FWIW, it does take significant time to design individual typefaces. It’s not just a set of characters: it’s the character in lowercase and uppercase, how letters appear differently when adjacent to certain other letters, punctuation, etc.
A significant amount of time goes into the process.