Type is a commodity today, available everywhere. If your friend is going to use that font professionally, and get paid for designs that use that font, then it’s doubly reprehensible (though legally no different). If your friend would otherwise have bought the font, thus giving the manufacturer and ultimately the designer their pittance (and it is a pittance have you looked at how low font prices are these days?), then you’ve prevented that paltry sum from reaching the hands of the person who deserves it.
#Pirate fonts lettering license#
Technically, if you copy a licensed font and give it to a friend to use, you’re in violation of the license agreement and are stealing that font. It’s very easy to steal fonts all you have to do is copy them. The days when large amounts of money could be made in the type business are long gone. Most of those are small companies, some very small, and the designers who created the typefaces routinely devote an absurd amount of time, effort, and talent to the task of type design, only to reap pretty meager rewards even when everyone who uses their fonts pays for them. Psy/Ops, and Treacyfaces Inc., representing the typeface designs of more than 40 typeface designers Linotype and House Industries supported the suit.
#Pirate fonts lettering software#
The foundries involved in the lawsuit were the Hoefler Type Foundry Inc., Emigre Inc., Active Images, FSI Fonts und Software GmbH, International Type Founders, Inc., Jeffery C. No one likes to play the heavy, but as Hoefler says, “We’re pleased to have demonstrated that anyone discovered pirating fonts in any capacity will be held accountable to the entire industry.” (Some of you receiving this e-mail are the very people for whom I created many of these faces.) Through an unprecedented sharing of resources, eleven type foundries cooperated to investigate and prosecute this matter three years later, I’m happy to announce that we’ve finally settled with the malefactor.” Hoefler summed up the process: “In 1999, someone nicknamed ‘Apostrophe’ hijacked all of our font libraries and posted them to a number of online forums. More after the jump! Continue reading below↓įree and Premium members see fewer ads! Sign up and log-in today.
It was time consuming, unbelievably expensive, and just generally wretched.” The Hoefler Type Foundry recently sent out a press release, their first, addressed to “dear friends and colleagues,” announcing a legal settlement with “a font pirate who we’ve been pursuing for some time, in concert with Emigre, House Industries, FontShop and others.” As Jonathan Hoefler aptly put it in his accompanying e-mail, “None of us enjoyed this process. It’s robbery, and there’s nothing glamorous or Robin-Hood-like about it. Font piracy just means stealing someone else’s work, which they’re trying to sell, and giving it away to all and sundry - or slapping your own name on it and selling it yourself. It’s really a lot more sordid and petty than that. I can see it now: the glittering cocktail party for the exotic princess, the fabulous rare fonts dangling from her neck, and the plot to steal them after midnight from the locked safe in her boudoir.īut no.
International font thieves! Simultaneously italic and bold, they switch suavely from evening dress to the all-black garb of the cat burglar. Font pirates might better be known as font burglars, or font thieves.Īh, but that conjures up yet another romantic vision. Font pirates are not fabulous scallywags, cruising the sealanes in search of golden serifs, forcing corporate minions to walk the plank, and flying the Jolly Roger in the face of civilization.
One of the most notorious font pirates has been captured on the high seas, hauled in irons to the King’s port town, and hanged on the scaffold in front of the cheering populace.
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