The font patrimony

Commentary
November 8, 2003

The font patrimony

.....

¶ When you buy a car, are you paying royalties to the inventor of the wheel? You pay for the physical wheel all right, but you and the car company are not paying royalties to anyone for having had the idea of using a circle-shaped object to facilitate motion. When you write software that uses Pythagoras's formula for computing the length of the diagonal in a rectangle, are you paying patent or copyright fees to someone in Sicily? I don't think so, since using a round wheel and taking the square root are inalienable rights of the society. For the same reason, using letter forms invented hundreds of years ago should be a right for which we should not have to pay. The typographic work of Ludovico delli Arrighi, Augereau, Garamond, Fournier, Caslon, Didot, and hundreds of others belongs to humanity, and not to some company which happened upon some matrices or electronic fonts along the way. The work of the old typographers, work created before 1950 (or even 1990--more about that later) should be in the public domain, and no one should ever be allowed to profit from the use of the letterforms created by our ancestors.

The atmosphere

¶ I often visit web sites like Typophile, where typographers gather for chit-chat. I should compile statistics on this, but a rough estimate is that over 50% of the postings involve some economic issue. One would think that typographers would be interested in typography, but that is clearly no longer the case. Someone asking for a free version of a commercial font is immediately branded a thief. Copyright and trademark law are accepted on face value. I have not seen one discussion on these message boards regarding the possibility that these laws are oppressive. They favor the haves over the have-nots, they favor the rich who can afford legal protection over the poor, and by extrapolation, they favor the United States and some European countries over the rest of the world. Ultimately, type design is about beauty and/or functionality of letterforms, about culture, about communication, and not about legal mumbo-jumbo.
¶ Companies such as Agfa subliminally influence users by stating that fonts (electronic versions of typefaces) are software---they are not. The idea is to set up the ultimate legal defence, that fonts are protected by software copyright. Others in the European Community are right now, as I write, trying to push through a law that would make software even patent-protectable. All of this is done from the top down, under the pressure of blue chip companies. The only winners, as those who have ever been to court must realize, are the lawyers. All of this is hopelessly wrong.

Generic fonts

¶ Copyright and patent law have clearly gone too far. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the United States is despised by most computer scientists around the world. Academics have gone to great length explaining how it will restrict education and research. The population at large, uninformed as it is on most issues, is unaware of the extent to which copyright and patent law are negatively affecting their quality of life. More than half of the internet users today are criminals, because they have downloaded material that was not supposed to be downloaded under the current repressive laws. Can society continue if most of its members are breaking certain laws? Are the laws then not wrong by democratic extrapolation (over 50% is a majority!)?
¶ All of the above focuses too much on the electronic format of a font, as if this matters at all. Very soon, all of us will have software that will be able to make a near-perfect electronic font from a picture sample of the typeface. Noisy outlines will be automatically smoothed, and more than decent kerning pairs can be created on the fly. So, it's not about bits and bytes, but about the shapes themselves, which, as I argued above, belong to our forefathers, and to the collective culture. Staring into a crystal ball, we may find that exchanging picture specimens of typefaces will one day be equivalent to exchanging electronic fonts, while showing a font on a screen will be equivalent to posting a font file in a newsgroup.
¶ Unless a typeface is a major deviation of a historic typeface, it should be in the public domain in whatever format it appears, electronic, photographic, metal, gif picture, jpg picture, pen drawing, or bitmap. To put it succinctly, any company could charge any amount of money for the use of its version of Garamond-Italic, but no company should be able to sue anyone for exchanging pictures or electronic files describing this typeface. I stress the equality between a drawing and an electronic file!
¶ But how can modern type designers make a living? Like with anything, the mere fact that one spends many hours doing it, does not mean that financial reward is deserved or guaranteed. Otherwise, we could all claim money for a hobby. It is more comparable to the marketing of medical drugs: the pharmaceutical companies make all the profit from a new drug in the first few years of its existence, before it becomes "generic". And that, in a nutshell, is the solution---generic fonts. After a given time, a totally new typographic design should become generic, at which time it's a free-for-all. Protection could be set up for a number of years, with that number reasonable in the present context, say 10, and then only for radically new designs.

No trademarks

¶ The generic font solution does not mean that after some years, we should forget about the hard work that goes into the design of a typeface. Hopefully, people will have the decency to cite sources of typefaces either directly (in the name of the typeface) or indirectly (in the information contained with the typeface). In this respect, note that the generic solution also implies that we will have fewer font names to contend with, as we can keep calling "Times" "Times". Presently, a Linotype trademark on that name disallows this, and thus forces imitators to create different names for a Times design. This creates tremendous confusion in the market. Trademarks on font names would have to disappear, to be replaced by some form of protection of company-specific font names, as in TimesBE (Berthold's imaginary version of Times) or CourierIBM (IBM's version of Courier) or VerdanaMS (MicroSoft's version of Verdana).

Copyright © 2003 Luc Devroye
School of Computer Science
McGill University
Montreal, Canada H3A 2K6
luc@cs.mcgill.ca
http://luc.devroye.org/index.html

	Commentary November 8, 2003 The font patrimony
.....	¶ When you buy a car, are you paying royalties to the inventor of the wheel? You pay for the physical wheel all right, but you and the car company are not paying royalties to anyone for having had the idea of using a circle-shaped object to facilitate motion. When you write software that uses Pythagoras's formula for computing the length of the diagonal in a rectangle, are you paying patent or copyright fees to someone in Sicily? I don't think so, since using a round wheel and taking the square root are inalienable rights of the society. For the same reason, using letter forms invented hundreds of years ago should be a right for which we should not have to pay. The typographic work of Ludovico delli Arrighi, Augereau, Garamond, Fournier, Caslon, Didot, and hundreds of others belongs to humanity, and not to some company which happened upon some matrices or electronic fonts along the way. The work of the old typographers, work created before 1950 (or even 1990--more about that later) should be in the public domain, and no one should ever be allowed to profit from the use of the letterforms created by our ancestors.
The atmosphere	¶ I often visit web sites like Typophile, where typographers gather for chit-chat. I should compile statistics on this, but a rough estimate is that over 50% of the postings involve some economic issue. One would think that typographers would be interested in typography, but that is clearly no longer the case. Someone asking for a free version of a commercial font is immediately branded a thief. Copyright and trademark law are accepted on face value. I have not seen one discussion on these message boards regarding the possibility that these laws are oppressive. They favor the haves over the have-nots, they favor the rich who can afford legal protection over the poor, and by extrapolation, they favor the United States and some European countries over the rest of the world. Ultimately, type design is about beauty and/or functionality of letterforms, about culture, about communication, and not about legal mumbo-jumbo. ¶ Companies such as Agfa subliminally influence users by stating that fonts (electronic versions of typefaces) are software---they are not. The idea is to set up the ultimate legal defence, that fonts are protected by software copyright. Others in the European Community are right now, as I write, trying to push through a law that would make software even patent-protectable. All of this is done from the top down, under the pressure of blue chip companies. The only winners, as those who have ever been to court must realize, are the lawyers. All of this is hopelessly wrong.
Generic fonts	¶ Copyright and patent law have clearly gone too far. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the United States is despised by most computer scientists around the world. Academics have gone to great length explaining how it will restrict education and research. The population at large, uninformed as it is on most issues, is unaware of the extent to which copyright and patent law are negatively affecting their quality of life. More than half of the internet users today are criminals, because they have downloaded material that was not supposed to be downloaded under the current repressive laws. Can society continue if most of its members are breaking certain laws? Are the laws then not wrong by democratic extrapolation (over 50% is a majority!)? ¶ All of the above focuses too much on the electronic format of a font, as if this matters at all. Very soon, all of us will have software that will be able to make a near-perfect electronic font from a picture sample of the typeface. Noisy outlines will be automatically smoothed, and more than decent kerning pairs can be created on the fly. So, it's not about bits and bytes, but about the shapes themselves, which, as I argued above, belong to our forefathers, and to the collective culture. Staring into a crystal ball, we may find that exchanging picture specimens of typefaces will one day be equivalent to exchanging electronic fonts, while showing a font on a screen will be equivalent to posting a font file in a newsgroup. ¶ Unless a typeface is a major deviation of a historic typeface, it should be in the public domain in whatever format it appears, electronic, photographic, metal, gif picture, jpg picture, pen drawing, or bitmap. To put it succinctly, any company could charge any amount of money for the use of its version of Garamond-Italic, but no company should be able to sue anyone for exchanging pictures or electronic files describing this typeface. I stress the equality between a drawing and an electronic file! ¶ But how can modern type designers make a living? Like with anything, the mere fact that one spends many hours doing it, does not mean that financial reward is deserved or guaranteed. Otherwise, we could all claim money for a hobby. It is more comparable to the marketing of medical drugs: the pharmaceutical companies make all the profit from a new drug in the first few years of its existence, before it becomes "generic". And that, in a nutshell, is the solution---generic fonts. After a given time, a totally new typographic design should become generic, at which time it's a free-for-all. Protection could be set up for a number of years, with that number reasonable in the present context, say 10, and then only for radically new designs.
No trademarks	¶ The generic font solution does not mean that after some years, we should forget about the hard work that goes into the design of a typeface. Hopefully, people will have the decency to cite sources of typefaces either directly (in the name of the typeface) or indirectly (in the information contained with the typeface). In this respect, note that the generic solution also implies that we will have fewer font names to contend with, as we can keep calling "Times" "Times". Presently, a Linotype trademark on that name disallows this, and thus forces imitators to create different names for a Times design. This creates tremendous confusion in the market. Trademarks on font names would have to disappear, to be replaced by some form of protection of company-specific font names, as in TimesBE (Berthold's imaginary version of Times) or CourierIBM (IBM's version of Courier) or VerdanaMS (MicroSoft's version of Verdana).
	Copyright © 2003 Luc Devroye School of Computer Science McGill University Montreal, Canada H3A 2K6 luc@cs.mcgill.ca http://luc.devroye.org/index.html