copyrights

FontCreator - Font Editor FontCreator - Discussion
1

I understand from various internet sites that fonts can’t be copyrighted, but that it is a contravention of copyrights if a font such as Adobe Garamond is opened by a program such as FontCreator, slightly changed by moving the control points, then saving and considering a new font - this is the difficulty with Southern Software’s numerous fonts that were ruled invalid in a lawsuit (actually rules for a single Adobe font, but the similarity of all SS fonts creation practices put the company out of business).

It is seems to be ok to print the glyphs of Adobe Garamond or other font, scan the printed page, and use the results to create a facsimile of Garamond. I wonder, though, about a procedure where one prints the glyphs of AG within a program such as Corel Designer, converts the glyphs to outlines (that have no control points), and then import the outlines into FontCreator to produce a facsimile? There are numerous Garamond fonts that are sold by many different font companies who perhaps used similar procedures.

Does anyone have any thoughts about the legality and ethics of such a procedure?

2

Thanks for the reply. Actually, recently I purchased High-Logic’ Scanahand, and found that is is very simple to use that program to copy, via printing the glyphs of a commercial font, to produce a pretty good copy of the font. Kerning is not bad although not nearly as satisfactory as that of the original commercial font.

3

Yes, I have a ttf font created using Scanahand in the Gallery forum. As far as Scanahand is concerned I have mixed feelings. On the one hand it is very quick and does ok with a rough font. However the resultant glyphs are much larger than they should be and need to be decreased in size. Also, the glyphs need quite a bit of editing to correct the control points. I was working with a commercial font where I ended with a high resolution bitmap of the Scanahand guide sheet with the font characters printed onto the guide sheet. I’ve attached three screen captures of a comparison. In the large photo, the left glyph is from printing the W in Adobe Illustrator, changing the character to outlines, and imported into FontCreator, the right glyph is that created by Scanahand from my guide sheet without any editing. Both look about the same, but if one looks at details, then the difference is clear - the details photos show a magnified view of the two glyphs and clearly Scanahand has only approximated details. In some case, the differences are much greater than shown here.
commercial-scanahand.png
commercial_detail.png
scanahand_detail.png

4

If you have a copy of FontCreator, then why do it via Scanahand? Scanahand is limited to a relatively low resolution scan because its tracing a whole page. FontCreator traces one glyph at a time.

Scanning an Entire Alphabet

BTW, your font is missing a lot of essential glyphs. I recommend starting a new font, including outlines from the default template font, replace the empty glyphs and any others you don’t like with your own.

5

Bhikkhu,
I realize my font is missing several glyphs; I had started to work on a new edition with added glyphs. But I had already realized that Scanahand was not really suitable for high resolution work despite my best efforts so I’ve abandoned my efforts with Scanahand. Unfortunately it lacks accuracy, even though the program is a fast way to produce a font. I’ll work on a new edition without Scanahand but it will take some time.

I have a question - back to copyrights: undoubedly a Scanahand font derived from a commercial font does not violate copyrights, BUT does the method that I outlined in my post with uploaded images - printing a commercial font in Adobe Illustrator, coverting the type to outlines, and importing that to FontCreator - violate copyrights. I ask because the resulting glyph in FontCreator is remarkably like the original commercial font glyph directly imported into FontCreator, and is far more accurate than I can achieve by a very high resolution scan of enlarged printed letters of the font. The imports from Illustrator and directly from the commercial font are not identical in contour points but they are very very similar. I don’t want to violate copyrights, but on the other hand, I hesitate to discard tools such as Illustrator to create a similar font to a commercial one.
Bob

6

I am not a lawyer, but that premise seems wrong to me. It seems to me that the rules may be very different from one country to another.

I emphasise that I am not a lawyer, yet it seems to me that fonts are classified as software and possibly art and may well be subject to copyright in at least some jurisdictions.

I am in the United Kingdom and maybe the law here is different from the law in some other countries, even though there is an international convention on copyright and maybe I do not understand the law correctly anyway.

There has been at least one law case over a company using unlicensed copies of fonts on computers in its offices. I do not have the details but I remember reading about it some time ago.

As you say that you do not want to violate copyrights, which is a good attitude to have, I would not want someone to mistakenly violate copyrights because of not understanding the law.

I do not understand the law myself.

What I sometimes do is look at a letter, such as, say a capital W, for various fonts in WordPad to learn the general techniques, and then design my own letter W from what I have learned.

Something I saw years ago, was a news item about a letter to a newspaper, in the days when the typesetting for that newspaper was done by phototypesetting. The letter had pointed out that the lowercase w in the text in the newspaper was back to front. The response was yes it was and a new version was now going to be obtained. It is interesting to consider the design of a lowercase w and realize how a lowercase w has a correct way round in some fonts. I like to think of the way to draw a w is that the w is constructed by first there is part of a v and then there is the whole of a v.

I like to try looking at letters and comparing and contrasting how they are drawn, for a particular letter from font to font and also for different letters within the same font. For example, considering the way that the top of the vertical in a p and in a q is drawn in various fonts. Then use that as inspiration for my own drawing. I mention that I have not been formally trained as a type designer, so that may possibly not be the official approach, I do not know, yet I find it interesting so I mention it whilst also stating the limits of my knowledge.

I hope that this helps. I write because I admire your enthusiasm and as you do not want to violate copyrights I feel that I should comment.

Finding out the definitive legal position might be a difficult and very expensive thing to do as it would need specialist legal advice.

The following link might be of interest.

http://www.ipo.gov.uk/

I searched for fonts and I have not found anything directly relevant thus far.

I am aware that it is important to learn about existing practice, yet I feel that I also wish to encourage originality and creativity.

Views may vary, yet for me I much prefer it when people produce something original, even if it is not perfectly in tune with conventional wisdom. Hopefully then helpful people will constructively suggest improvements that can be made.

I hope that this helps, yet as I say, I am not a lawyer.

William Overington

5 September 2011

7

FontCreator does such a great job because it converts the postscript vectors (with curves described as cubic bezier curves) into TrueType based outlines (with curves defined through quadratic bezier curves).

Also see: From Vector (e.g. an Adobe Illustrator image) to Font

So basically you are saving the original font into another font format. TypeRight defines such behavior as Piracy.

8

I fully agree that opening a commercial font in FontCreator, then slightly changing a few of the control points manually or by using the ‘Glyph Transformer’ of FontCreator, replacing all the previous naming data with new information, and renaming the font is wrong, unethical, and illegal. However, that situation is not what I curious about. I’ve read in the internet various articles about font copyrights: there seems to be no doubt that printing enlarged letters of a font, scanning them, and using a program to extract vector based curves is not a violation according to the results of the only trial in the US about font copyright violations that I am aware of. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Systems,_Inc._v._Southern_Software,_Inc. That is, the actual outline of the glyphs is not protected by U.S. Copyright laws. To put it in another way, it is ok if one were to print an enlarged alphabet of a font, place it in an opaque projector and project the enlarged character outlines onto a sheet of paper, scan that enlarged drawing, and then use the scan to create a new font. Scanahand does this electronically although not very accurately. I don’t think that Scanahand is fundamentally a copyright violating program. It actually is not that much different from how it seems Adobe created the font it based its lawsuit upon - it started with a bitmap font, and opened it in a font program to produce a vector based font.

In the trial of Adobe vs SSI the court ruled that the font editor, a human being, choses the control points in their font program to best approximate the scanned and printed bitmap font on which the font was based, and that the human editor was exerting creativity in his/her choice of how to place and alter control points to best fit the bitmap glyphs. Adobe argued that two font editors starting with the same bitmapped glyph would probably end up with differently place control points; thus the creativity. What SSI did was to take their fonts and slightly alter the size by changing the vertical sizes by 101% and doing nothing else with Adobes original control points.

When I study the control points of a glyph created by Scanahand from a commercial font glyph, it is obvious that the control points are not the at all the same, thus there should be no copyright violation in my view. The same occurs when a commercial glyph is printed in Adobe Illustrator, converted to curves, and imported into FontCreator - the control points are not the same (although they are much closer than those created by Scanahand because of the greater accuracy of Adobe’s program), and the control points are not based on a vector based font glyph but rather on the outline or precise shape of the glyph (in much the same manner as my example of drawing outlines from an alphahet projection). The control points being based on the precise shape of the glyph, means I think that they are equivalent to those produced by high resolution scanning a highly enlarged printed character. And, in fact there are some significant changes in Illustrator’s glyphs because even that program does not produce a absolutely perfect vector image of the glyph. Often the resultant imported curves require changes in the control points with FontCreator to produce the best looking glyph - there is my original contribution to the font. In addition to these changes are also some efforts required to reduce to proper size because the Illustrator imports are always much to large for proper font creation. And of course my kerning and hinting is done with FontCreator together with my later manual adjustments of poorly kerned glyph pairs. For these reasons, my derivative font is not the same as the commercial font it was based on; it’s similar but not identical. There are many other Garamond fonts produced by different font foundries, and I expect that many of them used a procedure similar to what I’ve outlined, at least in recent years.

Thus my question about copyrights - to me it doesn’t seem clear at all that the Adobe Illustrator approach is really any different than scanning a printed copy of a font. I certainly am not completely convinced that the procedures using Adobe Illustrator produce a new font that do not violate the copyright laws; I believe it does not violate copyrights but perhaps the issue will be dealt with in future trial decisions that further defines copyright protections of fonts.

One additional comment - I have no interest or intention of creating a derivative font and attempting to sell it as an original one. However, the question is really the status of similar fonts that might be created with Scanahand. I would think that High-Logic would be interested in obtaining a definitive opinion from a copyright lawyer as to the status of Scanahad fonts produced from commercial fonts by printing the characters on the Scanahand guide sheets.

9

It just seems wrong and illegal to take an established font and change it just slightly. It would be like building an iPhone with all the same or similar parts but putting a different name on the back. Someone could basically take every Adobe font and use Scanahand to scan and change it slightly and then sell the fonts for less than what Adobe would sell them for. It is odd that there has been only one case involving font copyrights. I would of thought there would have been more.

10

There are two questions here - is producing and selling a look-alike font produced partly by Scanahand or Adobe Illustrator illegal by US Copyright Laws as interpreted by the courts, and/or is it immoral/unethical. I think the courts have decided so far that it is not illegal.

11

I think it is unethical to produce and sell such a font, but not for your own personal use.

12

I fully agree with you as to the personal use and sales. But there is another question - is it ok to distribute it to others at no cost?

13

I fully agree with you as to the personal use and sales. But there is another question - is it ok to distribute it to others at no cost?

No. Copyright law covers redistribution, not monetary transfer. You cannot do this any more than you can copy two-thousand “Star Wars” DVDs and mail them out to your online friends.

14

Just a quick question guys… If I were to edit a font that has been copyrighted, Does that mean I am violating the copyright law?

15

Neither I nor anybody here is a lawyer, so take this as unofficial opinion; but as a general rule, distributing a font copyrighted by someone else is going to be against the law, whether you modified it or not. If you modify a font you legally own for your own use, and are not cracking copy-protection or modifying copyright/legal notices, it will probably fall under fair use and the license terms.

16

Look for fonts released under GNU License agreements. They often allow you to edit the font, and redistribute the modified version, as long as the GNU License is retained. Read the agreement though, as they are not identical. SIL release some high quality fonts under an Open license agreement Gentium SIL Open License. Bitstream Vera is another quality font with an open license.

My fonts are released under this GNU license. The license basically allows you to do what you want with the font, even to sell your modified version, as long as you change the font name.

17

My main interest would be creating display typefaces from old lettering and specimen books so I’m not sure where the law, especially in the UK, would lie on this.

I see this more as keeping old type alive than stealing as I don’t autotrace or anything like like that, I simply use the existing font as a reference and ‘hand draw’ the new font in Illustrator, changing what I don’t like, adding a bit of uniformity and sensible geometry and generally trying (not necessarily succeeding) to improve what sometimes appears as a blurry mess in 70 year old print.

It’s still plagiarism, I grant you, but what isn’t?

So, for example, I might creat this:
german.png

from this:
german-poster-alphabet.png

18

What I understand from many years of reading and corresponding with Ulrich Steilh about this complex issue is that an original design may be registered and protected for 25 years in Germany and for 14 years in the US. Plagiarising an old design by scanning and tracing, or using Scanahand, or FontCreator, is not a breach of copyright, unlike editing TrueType font files to modify the outlines or metrics, or removing the copyright notices as done by font forgers who made enormous profits by selling their illegal copies at knock-down prices.

There are many interesting articles about The Font Forging Industry on Sanskrit.web.