Typophile

Is what I've written about typeface piracy/knock-offs for my current College project factually correct?

1339

Hey, I'm new and was directed here by a user on Reddit after I posted the same question there; "The fiends at typophile.com would help you greatly on this", I hope he's right and will really appreciate any help. Here's the full submission copy & pasted:

Background info:

I should first point out that this isn't any part of any essay - just an introduction to the development of my project. Grammatically it probably has plenty of errors; I'm not too worried about this, but feel free to go Grammar-Nazi on my ass if you wish.
It's probably worth mentioning that I'm in the UK, where patenting a typeface is different to the US. Also, College and Uni are different things - I'm not currently at a University standard of working.
Any help, corrections or opinions are greatly appreciated.
Sources:
- Info on UK typeface patenting
- Fayherbe / De Vringer's Dolly Catalogue
- General knowledge about piracy.

Write-up:

Typeface piracy is so common that it’s almost expected, and knock-off typefaces are very common amongst more popular fonts. To prevent knock-offs the designer has to legally copyright their typeface, and to do this they would have to patent and sell each character of the typeface separately; at about £60 per registration and a typeface usually having at the very least 26 characters, this could cost as much as £1,560 to copyright a typeface of only uppercase or lowercase characters – no punctuation or numbers included. When piracy is so common and easy to get away with anyway, spending this much to prevent knock-offs is quite likely not worth it.

I think that trying to put a stop to piracy is a losing battle – not only in the design industry, but in the music, film, software and gaming industries too. In an attempt to lessen the effects of piracy in these industries companies usually try to punish those pirating but it usually has little to no impact on the pirates, and instead makes things difficult for honest customers – in turn potentially turning them to pirating too. This is done through things like increasing prices to make up for lost sales, putting anti-piracy ads which can’t be skipped before legal DVD’s, tethering content to an online account so that it can only be accessed as long as an internet connection is maintained, and many other tactics. I think that I can learn from the mistakes that I see in these actions in other industries; these are all attempts at discouraging piracy; I think that instead these industries have to adapt, and to encourage the more ethical option.

The biggest problem and influence on piracy is that everything being stolen is easily copied, and therefore seems value-less. I guess a pretty obvious starting point would be to go back to physical work – which brings me back to the idea I had while looking at dolly’s catalogue by Fayherbe / De Vringer – giving the client what would effectively be a physical copy of the typeface as well as a digital copy (which would be sent via email and also come attached to the physical copy somehow). This way you’re rewarding honest customers and making the ethical option a lot more tempting. I’ll look into ways to give the client a physical copy of the typeface later, but I already have some basic ideas after looking at Fayherbe / De Vringer’s work.

Again, thanks for any help!

James Michaels

> giving the client what would effectively be a physical
> copy of the typeface as well as a digital copy

What do you mean by "a physical copy"? A copy on a CD? I don't think that would be much of an incentive for the customer.

butterick

The biggest problem and influence on piracy is that everything being stolen is easily copied, and therefore seems value-less

Fonts don't seem valueless to those who pay for them.

It's not especially productive to look at piracy as this absolute moral wrong to be eradicated. More accurately, piracy is a cost of doing business. If you cast your eye around the font industry, you'll notice that just about everyone chooses to keep selling fonts despite the costs of piracy.

Put it another way: if your thesis fails to explain observable reality, there's a flaw in your thesis.

John Hudson

Matthew: It's not especially productive to look at piracy as this absolute moral wrong to be eradicated. More accurately, piracy is a cost of doing business.

While I agree that it isn't productive to view piracy as a moral wrong to be eradicated -- since such a view may result in devoting time and resources to attempting such eradication that will end up doing more damage to one’s livelihood than the piracy --, the fact of piracy as a cost of doing business doesn’t mean that it isn’t a moral wrong. The pragmatic if reluctant acceptance of a certain level of piracy shouldn’t be taken as endorsement. There is no case of ‘They didn't stop me, so it must be okay’.

Nick Shinn

I agree with Matthew.
The scenario you have described doesn't correspond with the reality of being in the font industry, which is supported by people who pay to licence fonts as a matter of course.

I don't think fonts can be meaningfully compared with other digital products such as music, film, etc.
Fonts are not a consumer product but a business expense, and businesses are less inclined to cheat than teenagers seeking entertainment.

At any rate, the putative impediments of piracy, plagiarism, freeware and bundling have been a condition of the digital font industry since it began, and a background against which it has managed to thrive.

butterick

the fact of piracy as a cost of doing business doesn’t mean that it isn’t a moral wrong

Right. Didn't mean to imply otherwise.

have been a condition of the digital font industry since it began, and a background against which it has managed to thrive.

Yes. "Thrive" being the key word. I've been hearing about the scourge of piracy since I entered the font industry nearly 20 years ago. Yet everyone in the font industry seems better off than they were then. There are more people making fonts, and more people making money off fonts.

Is there any designer who'd prefer to work in the font industry of 1991 rather than 2011? Even if I made the 1991 version magically piracy-free? I doubt it.

To go back to the OP, you're painting with an overly broad brush. If anything, the font industry has adapted better to the era of digital distribution than other industries. Perhaps a more interesting avenue of inquiry is why that has been true. Maybe other industries should be taking lessons from the font industry, rather than vice versa.

I would also encourage you not to get mired in the law of font copyrights. Those laws vary widely among jurisdictions, and in the end don't have a huge bearing on how the font industry operates.

blank

Fonts are not a consumer product but a business expense, and businesses are less inclined to cheat than teenagers seeking entertainment.

It's also important to note that many of the people using fonts are genuinely people who never have used them or would have purchased them. I used to know a guy whose three-story townhouse was wall-to-wall shelves of burned DVDs more movies, music, and games than he could experience in a lifetime. Like him, plenty of pirates are just geeks who hoard pirated content as a hobby. That has a real impact on the film, music, and game industries, because geeks who hoard content used to be their best customers. But geeks who download font giga-torrents just for the hell of it weren't buying fonts before, and they won't buy them in the future.

Richard Fink

Judge the relevance for yourself:

The Piracy Paradox: Innovation and Intellectual Property in Fashion Design
Shopping For Gucci on Canal Street: Reflections On Status Consumption, Intellectual Property, and the Incentive Thesis

When I was in the Fashion biz, whenever anything new appeared in the market, the first questions we asked were: How fast can we copy it? Can we bring it in cheaper? Can we improve on it to set our variation apart in some way?

A moral wrong? Don't know. And certainly moot.

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