Commentary March 30, 2001 The terror of Linotype

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¶ This little story plays itself out between March 28 and March 30, 2001. It involves two players, Linotype, a company that owns the trademark Helvetica, and "CybaPee", a dedicated font lover who runs the bannerless non-profit site TypOasis, and who has made about 30 wonderful original fonts. ¶ Back in 1999, CybaPee created a small font called HelvAssim, a frivolous take on Linotype's famous Helvetica (TM) series. Fast forward until March 28, 2001, when Linotype's lawyers contacted CybaPee. (Note: Helvetica is a trademark of Linotype.)

The lawyers' letter

¶ CybaPee receives a registered letter from Linotype's lawyers in Munich complaining about the use of the word Helvetica in the graphic shown above, which could be found on CybaPee's site until she took it off. This is allegedly a trademark infraction. Here are their demands: Send a fax with a "Unterlassungs- erklaerung" (=declaration not to use the word Helvetica any more). Send statistics how many downloads were done and how much banner clicks were made thanks to Helvetica. Immediately pay 1200 DM for lawyers' costs. Pay additional damages (up to 50000 DM) as soon as the requested information is received.

This Swiss coin from 1884 has "Confederatio Helvetica" written on it. The Helvetica name was trademarked by Linotype-Hell AG on January 9, 1973. Let's see: how likely is it that a company could trademark the name "Japanese", or "Japonais", or "Nihon-no"? Did the German trademark office fall asleep? A big office party on January 8, 1973, perhaps?

Commentary

¶ First of all, CybaPee's site has no banners, and she is not making any profits. In fact, she is running one of the most wonderful commercial-free sites on the web. This has escaped the Linotype goons' attention, obviously. ¶ Secondly, in the eyes of most people, such lawyers' letters are sheer terror. When will this end? Who are these sick minds? Are their lives that boring? ¶ Out of curiosity, I ran "Helvetica" in google, and got 269,000 hits. These included reputable publications such as Cartographica Helvetica, Helvetica Chimica Acta, Agronomia Helvetica, Helvetica Physica Acta, and even a site advertising Cannabis Helvetica, a potent and pleasurable Jamaican weed. There are hundreds of hits of web sites that show both the name Helvetica and samples of the font, including Bitstream's MyFonts.com. Were these sites sued? I don't think so. ¶ It is of course amazing that a trademark could exist for the name Helvetica, which is the Latin adjective for "Swiss", but putting that aside, I would like Linotype to show us the 269,000 lawyers' letters they wrote to all those users of that name. If they can't, it is because they have been targeting CybaPee for some time now, because she had some frank opinions on the terror tactics of Linotype's main enforcer, Bruno Steinert. This PDF file tells you which names can and cannot be trademarked: generic and geographic names cannot be trademarked, by the way. They could, in combinations, but that is not the case for Helvetica.

This graphic was made by a respectable design firm for AIGA, one of the major graphic design associations. Were they sued by Linotype? One of TypeRight's members, Boris Mahovac, used to run PixelPrint in Zagreb, and made a number of fonts, including HelveticaHeavy-PP-Bold (shown above). Was he sued? Or are members of TypeRight, an association that fights for copyright and trademark protection of fonts, exempt from Linotype's harassment?

Copyright © 2001 Luc Devroye School of Computer Science McGill University Montreal, Canada H3A 2K6 luc@cs.mcgill.ca http://cg.scs.carleton.ca/~luc