Agreed.

Harold's Fonts should hire Frank Martinez - he specializes in font protection.
http://www.martinezgroup.com/

BTW, may I ask what your interest in this is? Your only other post to Typophile also involved reporting possible font plagiarism.

hhp

Spam, should be removed, just advertising the game.

I'm pretty sure it's not.

hhp

It's kind of a terrible lazy design to be using anyway. Gen B works in its limited role as part of the logo, but its herky-jerky style is not suited to slapping on every darn thing that needs text. At the least, they ought to use Woodrow, the nice readable face in the show's titles and credits.

BTW, may I ask what your interest in this is? Your only other post to Typophile also involved reporting possible font plagiarism.

Well, back then, I meant to find some Latin fonts with exact design because those Hangul fonts had good-shaped Latin characters (unusual in Korean fonts).

Spam, should be removed, just advertising the game.

I put those pictures because I wanted to show the evidence right there. If it looked like some sort of game adverts to you, I'm sorry.

It's kind of a terrible lazy design to be using anyway. Gen B works in its limited role as part of the logo, but its herky-jerky style is not suited to slapping on every darn thing that needs text. At the least, they ought to use Woodrow, the nice readable face in the show's titles and credits.

You know something! At least Woodrow is more legible than Generation B. But from what I know, it has no Greek and Cyrillic letters so I think it may cause a little trouble for internationalisation.

@Zuhair
I'm not sure that the members of Typophile are an untapped market for this sort of game...

Thanks for your post on this and Harold and the Font Bros are well aware of this situation . . .

At the end of the day, legally there's really nothing we can do . . . A close comparison would be that a client specified Futura for their App and rather than buy Linotypes, they bought URW++s or Paratype's . . .

We know the folks from Hasbro have properly licensed the font and specify it in all the styles guides for the MLP product line but do not provide it to vendors.

Oddly, Gameloft DID contact us and we negotiated a license for them for this use, but then radio silence until we received word about their new game using a knock-off version of Harold's original font.

Again, legally they haven't done anything wrong but of course we're disappointed they chose the course of action they did.

Thanks for your answer. Seriously, why Gameloft choose that way? Nevertheless, we should keep spreading this news everywhere and put Gameloft folks on the pressure until they entirely change that font to a proper one. Remember, for economic reason, not everyone can count and sue every person using knock-off fonts in their personal fan works. But big and well-established company like Gameloft using it in that officially licensed game? This is more than a serious problem.

Remember the Hadopi logo incident? Although that would be a slightly different case from this because it was about logo designers using a legal font intended for exclusive corporate use in a logo of another, unrelated French government agency for copyright protection, people have noticed the infringement and soon, after lots of complaints and pushing, the agency had to change the font to a properly licensed one, before making another change in years later.

Public pressure is indeed a key weapon. And even if it doesn't work in a given case you get some exposure as a future deterrent.

hhp

Who: "Remember, for economic reason, not everyone can count and sue every person using knock-off fonts in their personal fan works."

But the relevant parties are saying that this particular case of knock-off is NOT illegal and they have no basis to sue.

This is often true. Knock-offs can be unethical, or just poorly done, without being illegal. In these cases, absent a violated contract or the like, there is usually no basis to sue the offending party.

On the other hand, “Celestia,” used in the context of typefaces and fonts, is a registered trademark of Mark von Bronkhurst. So, he might have a legitimate case to pursue against the maker of Celestia Medium Redux, if he cared to — at least to change the name, if not to cease distribution.

But the relevant parties are saying that this particular case of knock-off is NOT illegal and they have no basis to sue.

This is often true. Knock-offs can be unethical, or just poorly done, without being illegal. In these cases, absent a violated contract or the like, there is usually no basis to sue the offending party.

Hmm... This is becoming a bit more complex problem than I thought. What should be the attitude to the knock-off/fake/unlicensed fonts, especially when major company making an officially licensed product?

Simply getting a license will cause no problem, and it will bring original and quality fonts. But it costs so much if it's too expensive, and in major cases, using the font for different purposes may require to buy another licenses.

On the other hand, knock-offs are technically not illegal, only a little different from the original, and it will help reducing costs if it is free. But someone will notice it anyway, and even if there is no basis to sue, some will still tackle and complain. Besides, some of them has inferior quality than original.

This is getting more puzzled...

Anyway, despite not being illegal, it still shows how terrible Gameloft is at choosing fonts. And still, the people at Font Bros. are disappointed with what Gameloft have done.

I think that, normally, big major companies with such scale as Gameloft would just end up buying a proper license. Why did they act like... Um... 'Hey, I have no money for this.'? (Just my shallow idea, though.)

On the other hand, “Celestia,” used in the context of typefaces and fonts, is a registered trademark of Mark von[sic] Bronkhurst.[sic] So, he might have a legitimate case to pursue against the maker of Celestia Medium Redux, if he cared to — at least to change the name, if not to cease distribution.

This is kinda interesting. In the universe of the current line up, Princess Celestia is the co-ruler of the "magical land of Equestria" who raises the sun, along with Princess Luna who raises the moon. That is where the name of the original Celestia Medium knock-off font came from, and I guess the maker of that font may have not know anything about it. (And yes, it has absolutely nothing to do with Mark van Bronkhorst's Celestia Antiqua)

> would just end up buying a proper license. Why did
> they [Gameloft] act like... Um... 'Hey, I have no money...

A quick Google search finds that Gameloft has been criticized for copying other games, and that some employees have complained of 100-hour work weeks.

Many game companies are under a lot of economic stress because the rise of small game apps for smart phones and tablets. Used be that computer games routinely sold for fairly high prices; now people go app stores and buy games for a few bucks each. So companies may feel the need to cut corners to keep prices down.

I find it interesting that everybody thinks this is so horrible, but yet nobody except the original poster has disscussed the fact that Gen B was pretty much a straight copy of someone else's ( T. Hee, Bill Justice and Xavier Atencio) work to begin with.

So, copying someone elses work to make an "original" font - A.O.K.!
Copying the copy? Bad bad bad!
Really?

Many game companies are under a lot of economic stress because the rise of small game apps for smart phones and tablets.

The good ones are under a lot of economic stress because crappy ones like Gameloft cut corners...

Gen B was pretty much a straight copy of someone else's

Links?

hhp

Plagiarism, yes! We all know that type designers invented the alphabet, they didn’t plagiarise it from the Romans.

The link is the first one in this thread. The designer admits to it himself.

"Plagiarism, yes! We all know that type designers invented the alphabet, they didn’t plagiarise it from the Romans."

Yes I've brought this up before. The whole idea of plagiarism needs to be looked at differently in an area where everyone's work is 90% identical anyway. However this seems to make most around here very uncomfortable.

Do you mean the "inspired by film logos and posters between 1950s and 1960s" part? That's not good enough. Do you have actual fonts in mind that Generation B is copied from, to the same extent that the Gameloft font is copied from Generation B?

And you guys can't be serious that making a font implies plagiarizing a writing system. You can only do that with another writing system, and even that's stretching the definition of "plagiarism".

As for "90% identical": that's a very shallow way of looking at it.

hhp

Inspired by the animated opening titles of the classic live-action Disney film, The Parent Trap (1961), designed by T. Hee, Bill Justice and Xavier Atencio

Can you post some images of said titles so we can see how close it is? But if even Disney isn't suing it's probably not close enough. :-)

hhp

Yawn... Seems like a lot of work considering the designer admits on his own site where he got the "inspiration" from. How about you go out and rent the movie, take the screen grabs, and then tell me how they are different? Or you can just not believe me, I don't really have a dog in this fight anyway. I just think I smell a bit of hypocrisy in this thread, that's all.

OK, funk it, here's a youtube video of the beginning of the movie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWy2HpQpKCM

The title cards of most movies can be found using Google Images.

Ryan, why put "inspiration" in quotes? Do you think it necessarily equates to plagiarism?

And when you make a claim, you're the one who needs to show evidence. "whoiam989" has shown his.

hhp

Did you even watch the Youtube video? I have zero reason to make anything up here.

It's not about dishonesty; it's about interpretation, but also rigor.

Can you really compare an individual's font openly based on lettering from 50 years ago to a corporation's font covertly derived from a recent actual font?

hhp

I don't condone what Gameloft is doing, not at all, they can go F themselves. I just wonder why Harold's Fonts isn't also guilty of the same crime.

I also don't think just openly admitting to doing something makes it all OK. I mean if someone goes out and beats someone up, is it really all OK as long as they admit to doing it?

No, not the same at all.

hhp

Wow, not at all, huh? Wow.

Either all type designers are plagiarists by extension, or there is no such a thing as plagiarism in type design, anything else is just hypocrisy.

No, anything else implies that the real world is more complicated than some sort of absolutist there-are-only-two-colors-in-the-universe POV.

But I agree with Hrant that there is a big difference between making a typeface inspired by a small sample of hand-lettering used in a film, and making a typeface that is “trying to ape an existing commercial font” (that's a quote from the designer of Celestia Medium, when he pulled the font from distribution because he became convinced doing a knockoff of Generation B was wrong: see http://purpletinker.deviantart.com/art/Celestia-Medium-pony-font-1-5-204...).

She pulled the font after someone started a crusade of FUD campaigns on her, if she thought it was wrong she wouldn’t have done it in the first place.

Type designers just like to think they are special, every thing they do is a creation, unique, something the world have never seen and will never see, may be with some little, very little and insignificant inspirations, but plagiarists, those infidels how dare they imitate the creations of gods, lets FUD them to death.

Khaled, you really think what the designer of Generation B did was as bad as what the designer of Celestia Medium did? And do you really think Gameloft and Hasbro are innocent? BTW personally I would attack the companies before I would attack the designer because that could change things on a much larger scale.

Lumping inspiration and plagiarism together seems like an excuse to feel better about the latter, which usually happens by people who suck at the former.

hhp

Well, Hasbro treated me pretty well. They commissioned a special version of Boyz R Gross NF, with Turkish and Greek characters—the latter of which were a trip, since I had never done it before…

BTW, any thoughts on this?

http://www.typophile.com/node/98032

"Type designers just like to think" that their time, effort and expertise has value with which they should be able to make some of their living, which is perfectly reasonable and does not deserve such obnoxious hyperbole. Everything is a remix, but time and respect make worlds of difference. When Todd Goldman traces the work of relatively obscure living cartoonists and sells uncredited, unlicensed T-shirts of it at Hot Topic, we should not pretend that this is equivalent to John Williams echoing Gustav Holst in his score for Star Wars. There is a continuum between homage and ripoff, and the dividing line of what's acceptable is fuzzy but not extremely so.

the dividing line of what's acceptable is fuzzy but not extremely so

Have you considered one of those Lint Removers? IMHO, they work pretty well…

BTW, any fuzzy thoughts on this?

http://www.typophile.com/node/98032

Nick, Hasbro probably has no clue what went on, and they'd rather not care. The higher up you go the less they [want to] know about details but the more power they have to change them.

Kevin, well stated.

hhp

Hrant—

The “higher up” thing is indubitably true. Evidently, my local sheriff would rather not know about the Independent Contractors working in his department. Either that, or he would prefer that the voters of this county not know…

Just sayin’…

Inspiration is different from plagiarism. All artists and designers are influenced by the work of others. But inspiration becomes plagiarism when you simply make a copy of someone else's work.

Khaled, you really think what the designer of Generation B did was as bad as what the designer of Celestia Medium did?

No, I think they are as fine.

Lumping inspiration and plagiarism together seems like an excuse to feel better about the latter

So when inspiration ends and palgirism starts, when it it is 50%, 60%, less than 50 years old, less than 40?

But inspiration becomes plagiarism when you simply make a copy of someone else's work.

That is called copyright infringement, which is not the case here.

Fonts are not forms of art, type design is not an art, it is a craft, if type designers think they are artists they can go paint something.

Those are very shallow questions and views.

hhp

"Many game companies are under a lot of economic stress because the rise of small game apps for smart phones and tablets"

True, but it's also true that game companies have a long track record of being a) cheap in general and b) really bad people to work for.

Sorry for late response, but I was busy with school works and other factors.

Apparently, there are ongoing criticisms about this game regarding its economy system. But that's another problem.

I saw someone intervened in this thread with debate on originality, inspiration and plagiarism. At first, I couldn't decide which side I should take. Now, at least one thing is clear: We can tell whether it is a rip-off, knock-off, plagiarism, copyright infringement, parody or homage by looking closely at it and finding its background and context.

I may have missed a chance to comment, but I think Diner, oldnick, hrant, cerulean, Thomas Phinney and JamesM can get together to think about how to convince Hasbro and Gameloft to solve this problem. I'm going to send Diner's (official?) complaint to major fan news blogs, but how can I publicise this issue months after the games release? Please give me some advice.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Given the description of the situation in the initial post, I'm surprised to learn in a later post that Gameloft did not do anything actionable.

That implies, at the very least, that the font they are using is not a mod of the font from Harold's fonts in question; that it's freshly drawn, even if it closely resembles the other font. Font software is well protected by copyright law, even if font designs are only weakly protected in the U.S. (as opposed to not protected at all: there were changes in the law recently).

However, on re-reading the thread, it appears that Gameloft ought to be in deep trouble with Hasbro, because they've licensed the My Little Pony product, and they're not appropriately protecting its brand identity; by not using the official font specified, they're making a licensed product that is not, in this one respect, however minor, differentiated from what a knock-off counterfeiter could do.

And that would remain true even if Celestia Medium Redux is an entirely legitimate typeface in the same genre as Generation B, and not a rip-off or plagiarism.

Now, there's also the question of violating the trademark of the original Celestia Medium, as it may not have been withdrawn long enough ago for it to be inactive...

> it appears that Gameloft ought to be in deep trouble with
> Hasbro, because they've ... not using the official font specified

The licensing agreement undoubtedly gave Hasbro opportunities to view the game at certain milestones during development and during beta testing, to protect their interests. If the knock-off font was close enough that Hasbro didn't notice and object before the game's release, they'd have a hard time making the case that consumers (mostly children) would notice it.

Where does Neale Davidson's "Equestria" fit into all this?

Those are very shallow questions and views.

Really hhp? Try Googling

museum exhibits of typefaces

Very few hits. I get more with my name, or your name. Not at all like Googling "American Impressionist art exhibitions."

In fact, I got more hits with

museum exhibits of roller skates

Khaled is not being shallow, he's giving the truth, as upsetting as you may find it.

What makes you think I like museums? MoMA can stuff it.

If you'd been paying attention you'd realize that I've railed against "artiste" type designers more than anybody else here.

Khaled I suspect tries to find a Hosni Mubarak in every corner (nevermind that democracy is for peons). You probably have a bugbear (or three) as well since you read into what Khaled wrote whatever you needed to attack me. Go read it again after you tame your emotions. Upset, he says. I'm feeling virtually nothing.

hhp

These days my favorite word that I read type designers use with impunity is ... revival.

And these same type designers have the nerve to attach a EULA to their ... revival.

:)

Democracy rulz!!!

n.

If you'd been paying attention you'd realize that I've railed against "artiste" type designers more than anybody else here

Well, as a small dig, I can't read ALL your posts. Gotta work sometimes.

But what did I miss? I thought you were saying type design is a work of art, I thought Khaled was saying it is a craft -- tool building, in my words.

Where'd I go wrong?

Charles, maybe start by actually reading the posts I made just to this thread. And then resist to urge to prop up a straw man to hurl things at.

Art is selfish, and to me only interesting to the artist. Craft exists to serve others, which is exactly my cup of tea. But seeing Craft as some sort of soulless drudgery is exactly what the flaming artistes want.

HOWEVER: There is no pure Art or pure Craft; one might imagine an axis with those extremes, with any creative act sitting somewhere on that axis. So any creative act draws inspiration -in a traditional artistic way- from its environment; this does not equate to plagiarism, by any level-headed definition of those terms. Khaled's view comes off as conveniently absolutist. Typical so-called "open-source" agenda-driven obfuscation. He wants me to quote a percentage?! That's what I call shallow. And really, "if she thought it was wrong she wouldn’t have done it in the first place"?! What planet are we on again?

I myself revel in shades of gray, and to me things that are a much darker shade of gray deserve more corrective effort. Duh.

BTW: http://typophile.com/node/99015

hhp

Art is selfish, and to me only interesting to the artist. Craft exists to serve others, which is exactly my cup of tea.

Everything done is done in vain. The artist who paints a portrait, or a type designer who crafts a typeface ...there ain't no difference.

Street cred is gained only from being as raw as possible ...honesty isn't communal.

Rebel pride don't come cheap.

n.

Everything an individual does is a balance between what he wants, and social responsibility. Each of us does our own balancing act. And if we collectively don't have enough people leaning towards the latter, the former ends up suffering, for all of us.

hhp

A thread in which I recently participated concerned a typeface that someone expressed shock was still being offered for sale, despite being claimed to be an imitation of another typeface. In that case, it seemed clear to me that the "imitation" was merely a typeface belonging to the same genre; similar, but in no way a rip-off.

Looking into this case further, I see that here nothing of the sort applies. The two faces in question were clearly based only on the source typeface, not its sources - and they are, despite that, poor quality copies.

So, while I might still question whether there is any illegality involved, I definitely do agree that Gameloft ought not to be using a typeface of that sort instead of the real thing. In fact, if they can't negotiate reasonable terms for the use of the real thing (as they would be using it to create artwork, not to let users type words in the game, I presume, they wouldn't need to embed the font and enter into the stratospheric realms of that sort of licensing... but maybe they would need to embed it, say for scores and the like - I can't believe they're doing this to save $20) they would be better off buying a copy of Fontographer, and designing their own similar face.

Which could consist of one thing that Generation B, the real thing, seems to be conspicuously lacking for a face of this type... alternate characters.

(EDIT: Visiting the Harold's Fonts page, I see I was unfair; they do have "big" and "small" alternates for all the letters, at least.)

A face could have the same "feel" as that one but with different letters large, small, wedged left, wedged right, displaced upwards, displaced downwards, and so on and so forth.

Incidentally, I thought I'd look around to see other faces that were similar, but I couldn't get closer than faces like Crazy Loot BTN, Mother Hen AOE, Mister Rii PB, MVB Hotsy Totsy, Perfect Magic Bold, and Harry Plotter, which were still all quite different.

EDIT: Although I didn't see any real match, when I saw the full actual face on the Harold's Fonts page, instead of making me think of My Little Pony, it made me think of Big Daddy Ed Roth - whose name I keep having trouble remembering.

This whole discussion is really about personal values, and as such, it is getting nowhere, fast.

Why not visit this link instead?

I think quadibloc has a good point. I'll include permalinks to your posts in the e-mail.

Also, nice slap, dumpling!

Hi!

As the guy who "started a crusade of FUD," (an interesting way of putting it) some more information about the history of Celestia Medium might be helpful.

Back in the early days of the fandom, the only people who knew of / used Generation B in their work were me and a few others who actually took the time to figure out what font was being used. There was no knockoff version available at the start.

"if she thought it was wrong she wouldn’t have done it in the first place."

She didn't know it was wrong because she didn't know about Generation B or that she was ripping someone off in the first place. Sometime in spring 2011, PurpleTinker developed the Celestia Medium font based on a screenshot of Generation B (that was not labeled as such). She traced a PNG file of the Generation B character set that was posted on Equestria Daily . The first version of Celestia Medium was a literal trace of Generation B, but all of the metrics and proportions were screwed up. It was also missing the uppercase and special characters. The actual glyphs were fairly close to Gen B (it took a smart eye to notice specific glyph differences), but the glyph sizes were all normalized and the baselines too. This reduced Celestia Medium to a very block-like face, resulting in long strips of letters that had none of the whimsy or motion of Generation B. They were more difficult to read as well. A clear tell of Celestia Medium was the letter Os: they were the same size as all the other glyphs. Compared to the toy boxes, promotional materials, etc with used Generation B, it looked quite ugly. It sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the real deal.

I wrote the first "Why you shouldn't use Celestia Medium" in June 2011 based on the font that existed, and PurpleTinker agreed with me that people should use the genuine article. She was unaware of Generation B itself, having traced that PNG of the rip. There's no animosity between us on that, and she handled it about as classily as someone could.

When she took the font down, MattyHex started making Celestia Redux based on the original font file for Celestia Medium and started tweaking the glyphs to make it slightly different (and worse) than Generation B. I wrote the second "Why you still shouldn't..." bit in September 2011 right around the time that the Redux version came out. Since then, MattyHex has expanded the feature set of Celestia Redux considerably. He's added many special characters that didn't exist in GenB, and he also added a new set of lowercase glyphs (relegating the copies of Generation B's lower case to CR's upper case). The lower case makes it into something completely unrelated, and it's not a very readable face either. So Celestia Redux at this time has morphed into something quite different than Generation B, but people still try to use it as a substitute. Its uppecase still fares poorly compared to Generation B, especially now that he's specifically changed the uppercase glyphs to look kind of like Generation B but not exactly. MattyHex doesn't have the excuse that PT did; he made the Redux version specifically knowing about Generation B to create a knockoff version.

It's one thing for random fanartists to use Celestia Redux once or twice, but it's very tacky and a bit low for Gameloft who has an official license of the game to use a fan knockoff font. It's a pure case of cheapness and greed, which is not unsurprising given their other games and business practices. Other Hasbro licensees continue to use Generation B. This is not the first time Gameloft has appropriated fanworks; they've used several pieces of fanart (likely acquired from google image search) without contacting the artists as assets for the My Little Pony game and their advertising. As far as I know, this is the only case of Celestia Medium slipping into a licensed product. Not even the fan created licensed shirts on WeLoveFine use it.

On the usage of Celestia Redux in the game itself, they shouldn't have used it (or Generation B, for that matter) for all of that body text. Something more readable should have been used instead. I believe there is a body copy font that Hasbro uses on the toy boxes, but its specific name is escaping me at the moment. Generation B would have been fine for titling, but Celestia Redux is used for almost everything in the game, and it's very difficult to read because of it. It's true that Font Bros. basically has no recourse, because of the way the laws work here in the states (Which I'm sure many are aware of) and their response here details it pretty well. It's unfortunate that nothing can be done, but that's the way it is.

At the end of the day, my primary objection to Celestia Redux these days is 1. that it's ugly and 2. I think it's a shame that Harold is not getting his fair share from the unexpected popularity of ponies. Tons of people out there (that are not Hasbro) are making a lot of money off the pony fandom these days for things that are less work than fonts, and there's a lot of Celestia Redux being used in fanart or projects that are used/sold for profit. I just think people should do the right thing and pay the man his due.

Dan, thank you for the detailed "inside account", and for your stance.

hhp

Glad you replied, Kefkafloyd. Great observation of what happened.

Now, how should we promote this issue so Hasbro can become aware of it? Should I start with something like #MLPMobFont hashtag?

I've been hearing different things about GameLoft but in opinion it's a decent Game Studio. I recently took a test for a vehicle artist in their Madrid branch. Not sure what to think of this.

I think all of us draw inspirations from others and while deriving your own work from others seems fine to a certain degree there's a fine line between inspiration and plagiarism.