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From: patwood@unirot.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.text,misc.legal
Subject: Re: Font Copyrights
Message-ID: <445@unirot.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 24-Mar-87 22:16:24 EST
Article-I.D.: unirot.445
Posted: Tue Mar 24 22:16:24 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 26-Mar-87 02:28:52 EST
References: <792@bobkat.UUCP>
Reply-To: patwood@unirot.UUCP (Patrick Wood)
Organization: Pipeline Associates, Inc.
Lines: 15
Xref: utgpu comp.text:571 misc.legal:922

As of right now, the current opinion is that fonts cannot be copyrighted.
They can be trademarked, however, so if you created a font that was exactly
the same as Times Roman, you couldn't call it that because the name is
owned by Allied-Linotype.  As long as you aren't working from the original
digital data that produced the font, the result isn't covered by copyright
protection.  Similarly, if an artist created a font by hand using a printed
representation of a font, the result isn't a violation of copyright law.
Note that several contries outside the U.S. (e.g., Germany) have copyright
laws that specifically address typefaces.

For more information on this issue, I suggest you read Charles Bigelow's
article in the upcoming issue of the PostScript Language Journal.

Pat Wood
Editor, The PostScript Language Journal