Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!jarthur!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!husc6!contact!umb!karl
From: dhosek@sif.claremont.edu (Hosek, Donald A.)
Newsgroups: comp.fonts
Subject: Re: Facts on font protection.
Message-ID: <7744@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>
Date: 6 Jul 90 01:02:52 GMT
Sender: news@jarthur.Claremont.EDU
Reply-To: dhosek@sif.claremont.edu
Organization: Harvey Mudd College
Lines: 53

In article <1172@umb.umb.edu>, karl@umb.umb.edu (Karl Berry) writes...
Grossly chopped down:

>3) West Germany passed a typeface protection law in 1981.   
>4) England passed a typeface protection in 1988 (I think, give or take a
>year). 
>5) I don't believe any other countries have any sort of typeface
>protection.

France has copyright protection for fonts and Switzerland has
been considering it.

>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.

Copyright protection is more than a means of guaranteeing that
the font designer gets the money they deserve. It also can be
used as a guard against the production of inferior fonts (cf TeX,
which uses Copyright and Trademark protection to guarantee that
all TeXs are functionally equivalent).

Also, while your plan for how new typefaces might be created is
unlikely to give any type designer money to live on (I speak from
experience on this one). The types that are desired are seldom
things like ("gee, I'd like a new typeface that works well for
typesetting Latin [as in ancient Roman] texts"). Instead, the
cases where people are willing to pay to commission a typeface,
at least in the modern climate, are generally more along the
lines of, "we need a Hangul font" or "we need an Arabic font"
with little more than that specified. While this does leave a lot
of freedom for the designer, it doesn't do anything to expand the
bounds of traditional text faces.

-dh

---
Don Hosek                         TeX, LaTeX, and Metafont Consulting and
dhosek@ymir.claremont.edu         production work. Free Estimates.
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