That's what I thought...But how come Adobe doesn't go after this company? And the fonts...are they just traced from hard copies of the originals (to avoid having the same curves and points)?

Also, are the "Baskerville," "Bodoni," and "Franklin Gothic" names not protected by law because they are all digital revivals from the same source?

I've wondered about how these companies get away with this, too. There must be something, er, lax about Germany's laws in this area because it is home not only to Softmaker, but also Brendel Informatik and Primafont (which resurrected itself this year) � all of which are chock full of commercial font knockoffs.

The bummer is that all offer digitizations of quite a few old typefaces that are otherwise unavailable or no longer covered by copyright. Also, I discovered during this past year that Brendel offers several originals.

Oh, I forgot about that other German foundry, URW. They used to offer lots of knockoffs as well � many of them, I think, from their acquisition years ago of the Miles label. Those knockoffs have pretty much disappeared from their website offerings.

If only those other companies would purge their offerings and seek legitimacy.

Mike, I thought many of those URW 'knockoffs' were from their days as one of the early digitizers for other foundries, using their Ikarus system. My understanding was that they were allowed to keep versions of the fonts they digitized, if they renamed them (like Bitstream was too, I think).

No doubt you are correct, Mike. I was aware that Bitstream had gotten such a sweet deal � later deeply regretted by the other, copyright-holding foundries as I recall. I didn't know this about URW.

Yves, this thread might better attract enlightening posts if moved to the General Discussions forum.

Can anyone shed any light on why these companies seem to thrive in Deutschland?