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From: karl@umb.umb.edu (Karl Berry)
Newsgroups: comp.fonts
Subject: Facts on font protection.
Message-ID: <1172@umb.umb.edu>
Date: 5 Jul 90 21:27:51 GMT
Organization: UMASS-Boston, Boston, MA
Lines: 61


1) There is no copyright protection for fonts in the United States.
You can therefore scan any images you like from a type specimen catalog
(say), and do whatever you want with them. Of course, if you scan images
from a book, and distribute the images, and the book has the standard
clause about ``...may not be introduced into a retrieval system...'' in
its copyright, the publisher will probably not be happy with you (if
they ever find out you did it). But if you just use the data, you aren't
doing anything illegal.  (This is what we're doing to make typefaces for
GNU.)

2) You can get patent protection for fonts in the U.S., probably based
on, as one poster suggested, sufficient advance over the state of the
art. The one typeface I know of that is patented is Lucida, designed by
Chuck Bigelow & Kris Holmes.  (The advance over the state of the art,
roughly speaking, is that the design is meant to rasterize well at
medium-to-low resolutions, i.e., laser printers, not just at typesetter
resolutions.)

3) West Germany passed a typeface protection law in 1981.  It was not
retroactive. Many designs are therefore copyrighted in West Germany, and
copies of those designs could not legally be circulated there. But
designs done prior to 1981 are not protected (although some companies
have since copyrighted their versions of classic typefaces).

4) England passed a typeface protection in 1988 (I think, give or take a
year). It protects only designs done by English artists.  It *was*
retroactive.  What this means is not at all clear; no one to my
knowledge has ever been prosecuted under this law. As one example, take
Times Roman, designed in 1932 (pretty long ago, but not centuries) by
Stanley Morison (an Englishman), among others (e.g., Victor Lardent, the
punchcutter) for the London Times, first cut by Monotype.  There have
been hundreds (at least dozens) of copies of Times Roman.  Are all those
copies illegal now, i.e., could Monotype sue every other typeface
company in the world that has a knockoff of Times? Seems unreasonable to
me, but there's no evidence one way or another. As a more extreme
example, take the Baskerville faces designed by John Baskerville (an
Englishman), around 1768.  Can Baskerville's heirs sue all the typeface
companies? Seems very highly totally extremely unlikely, but there's no
evidence.

5) I don't believe any other countries have any sort of typeface
protection.

6) It is true that ``fonts are a tool''. But fonts are also a work of
art. It takes as much time and creative effort to design a typeface as
it does to write a novel, a large computer program, or what have you. 
It certainly seems unjust to me that type designers are not rewarded for
their efforts. For a long time, type designers could make a living
(although generally they did other things as well), because the means of
font production was so expensive that only a few big companies could
afford it. Now anyone with a PC can produce a font.

I personally do not feel strongly that copyright protection for fonts is
the best thing that society to do. What I do feel strongly about is that
type designers should be rewarded for their efforts. This can happen
without copyright protection: for example, people could commission a
type designer.  Even though the results would be free, i.e., potentially
anyone could benefit, the people who wanted it most would pay for it.

karl@cs.umb.edu