Reg - Linotype copyright action on Adobe-format fonts

[Petro]

On Tuesday, December 18, 2001, at 10:12 AM, David Honig wrote:

> At 07:35 PM 12/17/01 -0800, Bill Stewart wrote:
>> "ATM" is "Adobe Type Manager".  Linotype is a big font house.
>> Intellectual Property laws for fonts are normally even stranger than 
>> for
>> regular material,
>> but if any of these are in Postscript, they're also programs,
>> so there may be DMCA issues, and there's obviously some contractual
>> relationship with Adobe that lets them copyright implementations.
>
> IIRC fonts are not copyrightable in the US, but are elsewhere, yes?

	The shape of the glyphs is not copyrightable, but the application 
of a specific name to that set of glyphs is.

	You can copy *exactly* the shape of a font, and just call it 
something else. Helvetica->Arial/Geneva/Swiss (actually *slightly* 
different, but that was more an artifact of the original technology for 
them, Arial is TT, Geneva was a bitmapped font from Way Back on the Mac 
etc.)  Times->New York on the mac (as Helvetica is to Geneva, so Times 
is to New York, IIRC).

	Oh, but don't do it by just renaming the postscript, that's 
copyright infringement on the *code*, as is (probably) using some sort 
of Postscript->TT conversion that renames as it goes.

> Assuming that's correct, then an algorithmic font (eg Postscript) could 
> be
> turned into an albeit large static set of pixels which wouldn't be
> copyrightable in the US.

	That would be utterly pointless (no pun intended). The value of 
Postscript is that it *isn't* a set of pixels.
--
"Remember, half-measures can be very effective if all you deal with are
half-wits."--Chris Klein