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Terri: your note in CreativeProse likened “[t]aking food from home into a movie theater” to “[u]sing a font that a friend purchased for another client’s project” and implied that both are stealing. I know you’re trying to make a point, but I don’t like your example. Using a font outside the scope described in your contract with the foundry? Yes, a violation of your agreement with the foundry. Bringing your own snack into a theater? No. My agreement with the theater was that I pay them money to see the movie. If their business model is that they make their profit only through concession sales, then they need a new business model. I had no agreement to purchase popcorn from them as a condition of seeing the movie.
If you make a painting in the style of a well-known artist, have you stolen something from him/her? No. Even if you paint a version of their most famous work, as long as the work is yours and you don’t try to pass it off as not yours, then you are also in the clear. What if your version is better than the original? Should we protect bad art from improvement?
When you enter a theater you are making an implied agreement that no outside food or beverage is coming in with you — per the signs on the doors. Does that constitute stealing? The theater thinks so.
I’m not a lawyer, but in response to ripping off font designs, I go back to the old Compugraphic days, their fonts like Swiss and Humanist ((Helvetica and Optima knockoffs respectivly), and some articles in the design press at the time over whether or not Compugraphic was violating copyrights. If I remember the explanation correctly, you cannot copyright the design, only the font name, although I subsequently remember reading something about Adobe copyrighting or trademarking the algorithms for their font expressions. Let a thousand sans serifs flower! There are always the questions of quality of the design, character sets, output headaches and general availability to consider.
Many, many moons ago, I attended a BDA conference in Washington DC. At one of the luncheons the guys from House Industries gave a little talk about their craft. They stated that they’re biggest obstacle in creating typefaces was the law (or non-law) that “alphabets cannot be copyrighted.” They could only copyright the name of the font. So they had no recourse against copycat fonts. They stated that they tried to give their customers more than just a font, they would ship it in a designer box with a t-shirt to give it more value.
As for the last comment about theaters business model, my understanding is that the local theater makes $0 from the box office the first two weeks of a movies run, and then in 10% increments every week thereafter.
So now you know why the popcorn is so overpriced!
It’s admirable when an individual creates something like a font and makes it freely available, but that is their choice to do so; not every type designer or type foundry is obligated to follow the same course. It should be the creator’s choice, not because somebody liked the original and tweaked two or three beziér points and called it an improvement and an original work. Just like with music, there’s no inherent right to have access to another’s work without compensating the creator.
In your remarks in the weekly email, you give taking food into a movie theatre as an example of stealing. Not so. Stealing is breaking the law, and there is no law against taking food into any business, at least not in my jurisdiction. You are, of course, breaking a rule imposed by the theatre owner, but that doesn’t make it stealing.
OK, my bad for including sneaking food into a theater in the list of ethical no-no’s. But let’s focus on fonts. rstevenson, what do you think about look-alike fonts and using commercial fonts without paying?
– Terri Stone
Human nature is such that if a person feels a company is asking a fair price for a product, or service, they will gladly pay for it. However, if that person feels the company is taking advantage of them by selling something at an unfairly high price – the person may feel inclined to steal it.
I think the price of fonts is the problem. Most of my graphic designer contemporaries feel that fonts are overpriced by a factor of 10.
Think of how much you pay for an application you use all day every day, like Quark, Photoshop, or InDesign. Now think of how much you pay for a font family that you may use on one or maybe two projects a year. How does the value compare between those? It’s not even close.
I think font houses should adopt the same buy in and upgrade model as most other software companies. For example: $500.00 to buy into the program which would give you all the current fonts the font house sells and then $150.00 annually for any fonts that have been added since the previous version of the package.
The original font makers have legal recourse against those who infringe on their fonts if their fonts are legally protected. Those who play with fire will eventually burn themselves. There are also ample warnings in place, such as the dialog that pops up, when you include fonts with your print file.
This has been an on going battle for years. What is come down to, is ethics/morals. Those of us with the utmost integrity, usually the secessful ones in the design industry, will pay for and use quality fonts. I’d rather go through life knowing that my work is a quality product creatively and ethically, not to mention the worry free nights knowing that my work won’t crash my service bureau’s RIP because of a poorly designed font.
If theatres provided patrons a with healthy alternative to snacks and foods loaded with chemicals and fat, then I might agree. Also, the extreme high cost of their junk food means that many people who can barely afford to go to movies couldn’t to munch during the movie. It’s not a fair policy. And I’ve never seen anyone thrown out for bringing in food alternatives to the junk they sell… especially when it comes bringing kids to the movies.
Type foundaries have much the same problem as the music industry and like the music industry they need to grope around for a new business model. Lowering price is one good way. Buying a song for 99cents keeps a lot of people honest. The same would be true for fonts. As for theaters…who goes to theaters anymore?
If you work at or run a graphic design business, you can’t be using typefaces that you didn’t buy. It’s like many others who have commented here; it’s all about the ethics.
Ethics is something your business bears. Morals on the other hand is only a burden on our hearts. Using someone else’s fonts that you didn’t pay for and making money from their use is bad for both.
How bringing in food to a theater constitutes stealing, I’m not sure. I know it’s against their policy, but I wouldn’t buy anything they sell at that snack counter other than a diet pop/soda – if I brought my own munchies or not.
There is nothing wrong with using freeware fonts, even if they resemble fonts that are commercially available. What >is< wrong is setting sloppy type, whether on a web page, a billboard, on TV or in print. Well-known type houses have for years sold typefaces that are direct knock-offs of known designer faces. Bitstream is a prime example. Many of their faces are direct knock-offs of other fonts. Humanist, for example, is Gill by any other name. They even used to ship a desk accessory (remember them?) called Bitstream Analogue that showed the correspondence of their versions to known faces. And I assure you, the Eric Gill estate never saw a penny from Bitstream, so let’s stop worrying about those poor typehouses that used to charge $10,000 for their library and force every service bureau in the country to pony up. Free fonts? God bless the designers that release them to the public domain. Just learn how to set them properly.
In spite of the advent of Acrobat and PDF, the overall system for font useage still has some glitches that leave designers in floundering in gray areas. There needs to be some changes to the system.
Creativepro.com reader Henk Gianotten kindly sent me a PDF of a booklet he wrote that was published by the printers and lithographers association in the Netherlands.
Written in the Q&A format, the 16-page booklet covers many questions related to legal font use, such as “If the client has paid for the fonts, must the commercial printer or service bureau also hold licenses to the fonts and font software in order to be permitted to do the job?”
We’ve posted that PDF at /wp-content/uploads/sites/default/files/story_images/Fonts&illegal_software_English.pdf
– Terri Stone
The only similarity between theater snacks and major type house fonts is that both are outrageously overpriced. Fonts should be bought and type designers should be adequately compensated for their talent and time investment. But a business model where a font family may cost $200 is ridiculous. This implies that a single font family is in the same league as application software, which it’s not. How do I explain to a small client that his project cost $200 extra because I bought the “perfect” font when I know the client can’t tell Garamond from Baskerville? I like the iTunes model mentioned earlier. When I can buy high quality stock photos for $3-$25 I have a hard time justifying $69 for a single weight of a typeface. In my opinion, the current pricing structure encourages stealing. How does a young designer come up with $10K for a major type library?
The line between theft of a purchased commercial font and those considered knock-offs seems somewhat indistinct. It is my understanding that, if a graphic is altered in any way, it is considered original, however inappropriate this may be to the spirit of the law. As for simply “borrowing” someone’s purchased font for anything other than the purpose for which it was purchased, unquestionably illegal.
As for the theatre scenario, if I pay $8 to see a movie, they’ve made their money off of me and I’ll bring any damned thing I feel like eating in with me without remorse!
Cheers,
Kurt H. Selvig
Portland, OR
In the manufacturing sector, it a given that creative efforts will be borrowed, modified and morphed into new creations because patents are, typically, too difficult or costly to defend and the concept of copyright is impossible, yet the industry remains robust. Other industries have the same attitude, designer clothes to mention just one. Why not knock-offs?