Type Design List posting by Ray Larabie regarding the Famous Fonts site. Reproduced here to show Ray's take on the font situation. Ray speaking: Um.. Hey, my logotype fonts are all scratchbuilt and not based on commercially available typefaces. I told the owner of that site that typing out the actual brand names using those fonts is a trademark violation. I asked him to get rid of the pirated fonts (Diablo, Macromedia, Nokia, Dunkin Donuts, Weekly World Font, Volkswagen) too but nothing happened. Anyhoo. I think the natural evolution of type design is an accelerated fashion cycle. Planned obsolescence creates a need for brand-new designs. Type is no longer a long-term investment these days the same way men's suits are no longer a long-term investment ; men's suits can be worn for about 6 years before they look dated. Today's Cholla is tomorrow's ITC Anna. You can't sell very many classic business suits if your buyers have hundreds of classic business suits on their Corel Draw CD. The solution to Napster and similar technologies is quite simple: Lower the quality of the products available. Load your fonts into FontLab and jitter the points randomly. Upload them to alt.binaries.fonts and watch the font pirates dig in. Many of them will install the fonts without even looking at them closely. Imagine their looks of disgust as they sift through their font folders trying to get rid of the lousy things! Download a hard drive full of MP3s and run a distortion filter over them. Log on to Napster and dilute the free music pool just by letting people download the distorted songs. There's a limit to how far people will go to acquire these things. When I was very young I taped music from the radio. Eventually I lost patience with DJs talking through the songs so I got up off my arse and bought the records.