January 2006 Archives

One frustrating aspect of making fonts is that they are so easily stolen. I don't mean somebody breaking into my home (or even my laptop) and taking fonts, but rather font piracy. When a single font is only 20K or even 100K, entire families or more can be easily attached to an email or distributed via some "sharing" arrangement. What legal protections do font makers have for their intellectual property (IP)?

First, the standard disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer. If you want legal advice, whether it's for protecting your own fonts, or determining if your usage or distribution of fonts is legal, you should consult a lawyer. This is only an attempt to provide some background.

Generally, the protections fall under three categories: trademark, patent and copyright. Each protects a different class of things, and each has different scope. Patents and trademarks are country-specific, while copyright is more international in nature. In the USA, patents have the shortest life-span, copyrights are more lengthy, and trademarks can be eternal.

This is a pretty rare event - we haven't had an opening for font development since just after I started, in the summer of 1997. Frankly, we've been kind of blanketing all the usual typographic hangouts, so odds are good that if you're qualified, you've already heard about this. But just in case, here's our job posting:

I've been noting an interesting trend in recent years for type foundries and vendors referring to a typeface coming in a certain number of "weights" to mean what I would call fonts or perhaps faces. Folks doing this on their web sites include vendors both large and small.

I'd be tempted to just accept this as a change in terminology, but we already have words to express this distinction, and if we change "weights" to mean fonts, then what the heck to we call real weights? By "real weights" I of course mean that a typeface that has light, regular, bold and black weights has four weights - and it still only has four weights even if there are italic and condensed versions of each of those.

I'm not just pointing the finger at other folks here - a departed type marketing manager here at Adobe (who I generally have both respect and affection for, I might add) sometimes used the term "weights" in that fashion, and I suspect it made it into some of our public materials on occasion. But I think we need to reclaim the word for its previous typographic meaning, or else we have just increased ambiguity with no gain in communication. Or am I crazy?