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From: laser-lovers@uw-beaver
Newsgroups: fa.laser-lovers
Subject: Hershey fonts public domain?
Message-ID: <1039@uw-beaver>
Date: Mon, 15-Apr-85 19:24:33 EST
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.1039
Posted: Mon Apr 15 19:24:33 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 16-Apr-85 01:44:20 EST
Sender: daemon@uw-beaver
Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
Lines: 66

From: William LeFebvre <phil@rice.ARPA>

I'm beginning to doubt it!  I just did some investigation into our
purchase of a machine readable form of the Hershey fonts.  We signed a
sales aggreement to get them!  We also paid $400 for the tape!  Since I
wasn't directly involved with the purchase of the tape, I didn't
realize any of this until today.

What's even better is that the agreement is rather brief and vague.  I
will quote the pertinent parts:

----------------------------------------
IV.  Use of Product

	A.  Customer agrees that the product shall be used only at the
Customer's place of business or its contracted Computer Service Bureau.

	B.  Customer agrees not to copy, release, disclose, or
otherwise make the Product available, in its original form, as received
from NTIS.  Internal copies made for the sole purpose of disaster
recovery are permissable.

	C.  Customer agrees not to include the Product in an online
commercially available terminal service established to offer service to
users who are not a part of the Customer's organization.  However, the
customer may use the product as a part of an online service offered
wholly for the use of the Customer's employees.
----------------------------------------

The beginning of the document defines Product as "Hershey's
Contribution to Computer Typesetting, Order Number PB-263 925" in a
machine-readable form.  Now, what does including "the Product in an
online commercially available terminal service" mean?  Can I, for
example, rasterize the vectors and include those rasters in a program?
Can I, for another example, convert some of the characters to some
intermediate (and rather different) vector format for later use by a
program that draws characters on a Silicon Graphics IRIS, and then
distribute the converted form?

I obviously cannot give someone else a copy of the contents of the
tape.  That is explicitly forbidden.  But I find this next bit of the
agreement VERY interesting:

----------------------------------------
VIII. Effective Date and Duration

	A.  The effective date of this Agreement shall be the date of
acceptance by NTIS, as indicated below.

	B.  This Agreement shall expire five years after its effective
date.  On expiration, Customer shall be free to copy, sell or otherwise
distribute the Product without liability to NTIS.
----------------------------------------

This means that we (Rice University) will be able to freely copy and
distribute the contents of the tape in the summer of 1988.  What's the
use?

Sorry to have misled everyone on this, but it really looks like the
Hershey fonts aren't as public domain as I thought.  Anyone have any
further thoughts?

                                William LeFebvre
				Department of Computer Science
				Rice University
                                <phil@Rice.arpa>