Is this the wrong time to rant about font licensing though? I’ve always bought and paid for fonts, but as I’ve gradually transitioned to mobile app development, I one day realized that all the fonts I bought for print are now worthless to me.
These crazy outdated licenses that let you print as many magazines or books you want forever, for a one-time price. But if your hobby is making apps, then suddenly the same font will cost you 50 times more - for a single year.
I guess these font sellers imagine there’s still some app boom - a Klondike rush with developers bathing in dollars. Maybe if their licenses were more realistic, piracy would be less of a problem.
That is an absolutely brilliant turn of events – strong evidence that the font in an anti-piracy campaign was itself arguably a copyright-infringing knock-off.
Someone should sue FACT for copyright infringement – and refuse to settle.
I would happily pay for any font if I could get individual weights for say $5-$10 and entire families for $20-100 with any usage I want (print, web, etc). I feel like font foundries would print money this way. But for most projects, $300+ for a nice family (that can only be used in a hyper-specific context) is just insane when many free or cheaper alternatives exist.
Used to waste time and money with foundry stuff until Google Fonts caught up. Now I typically source something from there unless it's essential to the design.
I don't know if this actually counts as copyright infringement, since typeface shapes are not eligible for copyright in the U.S. (disclaimer: IANAL) so depending on how it was cloned, it might be legal.
The more amusing detail, to me, is whether or not XBAND Rough is related to the XBAND peripheral for video game consoles in the 90s. (Fascinating story, it was an add-on that enabled multiplayer over a phoneline on the SEGA Genesis/MegaDrive and Super Nintendo/Super Famicom.) Seems silly, however there is at least one source that seems to corroborate this idea, crediting the font to Catapult Entertainment, the company behind the XBAND:
What saddens me is that a lot of people are so ignorant that they don't even realize a font is something that takes creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort to design.
Copyright for most (if not all) fonts seems like something that just shouldn’t work. We want things in the public domain, like Shakespeare, and we want derivative works protected. Fonts are tiny differences on public domain work that 90% of people can’t tell. You wouldn’t want Disney to claim every pencil stroke difference on Mikey’s to be subject to different copyright terms, it would become a kind of perpetual copyright strategy. If there are true technical improvements to the way we represent letters, they should be covered by patents, with their shorter terms.
TIL: font designs are not copyrightable in the USA. Font files are but the design itself is not. It seems you are free to copy the design, but not the file. Not sure how that plays out in practice. Is it common to copy a font design or is it just more common to be inspired by a font design but make a new font that's in the same general design space? Like say Arial seems inspired by Helvetica but is not the same.
I am not registered with this private instance, but there is a comment that I want to reply to:
> This is so typical of people who are just doing a hatchet job for money but have no personal interest in the topic or skin in the game.
This is both true and incomplete. Advocates against piracy are time and again caught infringing on IP. I think about when Lily Allen stole the content of her anti-piracy screed "It's Not Alright" from Techdirt[0]:
> However, [...] the rest of the blog post – put there by Lilly herself – is someone else’s work. Arrr mateys, Long John Allen lifted the entire post from another site – Techdirt.com – effectively pirating the work of the one and only Mike Masnick.
> “I think it’s wonderful that Lilly Allen found so much value in our Techdirt post that she decided to copy — or should I say ‘pirate’? — the entire post,” Mike told TorrentFreak on hearing the shocking news.
The anti-piracy creators demand that we stay within their narrow definition of "piracy", which just so happens to exclude the work that they steal. Yes, the creative agency behind the "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" ad are disconnected from the cause. And their clients at the MPAA and FACT do not consider fonts to be worthy of the protections that are ostensibly the basis of their existence.
I spent some time last weekend playing with LLMs and SVGs- it turns out SVG is a domain specific language and LLMs know how to use it. I was able to get an LLM (grok from X.ai) to author SVGs from a description of what I wanted it to look like, and to modify existing SVG text to customize files that weren’t perfectly to my liking.
Fonts are also written in domain specific languages, I need to experiment with whether LLMs can author or modify fonts.
I do not think that the ridiculous terms that font and clip art and stock photo companies now offer, is going to be a viable business model in a couple of years.
We will all be able to use (for example) “LLM Helvetica Free” without any license.
Very early in my design education (late 90's) I was taught that fonts are fonts and the more you have, the better you tool set would be. As a graphic designer I definitely made things with fonts I had downloaded. It wasn't till I got my first serious design job at an agency where I quickly learned about purchasing and licensing fonts. Even if I could "find" a missing font, I wasn't allowed to use it. We needed to get the fonts directly from the vendor we were working with and if they were being too slow, we ate the cost and purchased the font.
The moral background for copyright is in free fall these days.
It is quickly turning into one of these things that there are laws for, and everyone thinks it is rediculous, it is never enforced and DE facto not a law.
What happens if you present an image of a page in some font to an LLM, and ask it to make you a font file for that font? An LLM could probably not only do that, but create matching characters for ones not already present.
It’s clearly not the same font (you can see visible differences between the letters), and therefore not pirated. The appearance of a typeface can’t be copyrighted in the US - only the digital instructions used to render them (e.g. if someone visually inspects a font and clones it that is perfectly alright, as long as they don’t directly copy from and adapt the underlying font file).
This comment section is precisely what I expected upon discovering this very funny anecdote regarding the irony and hypocrisy involved with the infamous anti-piracy advocacy of the late '90's/early '00s. Peak HN--didactic, humorless, and lost in its own takes about the absolute least relevant detail of the story: font licensing.
This sounds very critical, but I assure you, these are my people. I rather find it very reassuring, even a little charming.
But you can copyright a font name, so if someone copies your work and releases it under a new name... that's that's like creating a copy of the car piece by piece and giving it your own name.
So they were right: we not downloading a car, we never were. We were all just making copies.
Having worked in the graphic design industry during the 90's, no. There's no way I'd have just slipped a font I didn't own on a disk and sent it off to a printer. When it comes to fonts for coding... sure there was that ONE time I snagged Operator Mono for an extended "trial". I still believe in paying for things that I use on a daily basis, so I switched back to Sauce Code Pro or something.
Typefaces are not copyrightable but fonts are off, using a font with a knockoff typeface is not copyright infringement because it is not using the copyrighted font.
The concept of "piracy" and copyright is completely ridiculous.
Real piracy involves stealing, destroying and killing, not copying numbers.
I never entered in a contract with you, producer of goods or innovation, you have no right to forbid me from copying anything.
You may prevent your own customers from facilitating access of non paying customers to their goods (by making them sign a contract) and even persecute them in a civil court (for breach of contract).
The fact that governments allow copyright owners to censor information on the internet to protect their commercial interest is just absolutely insane and incredibly damaging to the freedom of circulation of culture and ideas.
I don’t think that’s productive. Best case response that I can imagine is piracy opponents pushing for some legislation mandating fonts with DRM.
Air quotes - “it’s obviously the fault of the person who cloned the font and the general public needs to be protected against such content” - end air quotes.
At the same time, it doesn’t have to be productive, it’s funny enough.
You wouldn't steal a font
(fedi.rib.gay)1368 points by todsacerdoti 23 April 2025 | 387 comments
Comments
These crazy outdated licenses that let you print as many magazines or books you want forever, for a one-time price. But if your hobby is making apps, then suddenly the same font will cost you 50 times more - for a single year.
I guess these font sellers imagine there’s still some app boom - a Klondike rush with developers bathing in dollars. Maybe if their licenses were more realistic, piracy would be less of a problem.
Someone should sue FACT for copyright infringement – and refuse to settle.
Anti-pirating ad music stolen [2013]: https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/01/29/3678851.h...
Used to waste time and money with foundry stuff until Google Fonts caught up. Now I typically source something from there unless it's essential to the design.
The more amusing detail, to me, is whether or not XBAND Rough is related to the XBAND peripheral for video game consoles in the 90s. (Fascinating story, it was an add-on that enabled multiplayer over a phoneline on the SEGA Genesis/MegaDrive and Super Nintendo/Super Famicom.) Seems silly, however there is at least one source that seems to corroborate this idea, crediting the font to Catapult Entertainment, the company behind the XBAND:
https://fontz.ch/browse/designer/catapultentertainmen
Of course, this could've just been someone else guessing; I can't really find any solid sources for the origin of this font.
> This is so typical of people who are just doing a hatchet job for money but have no personal interest in the topic or skin in the game.
This is both true and incomplete. Advocates against piracy are time and again caught infringing on IP. I think about when Lily Allen stole the content of her anti-piracy screed "It's Not Alright" from Techdirt[0]:
> However, [...] the rest of the blog post – put there by Lilly herself – is someone else’s work. Arrr mateys, Long John Allen lifted the entire post from another site – Techdirt.com – effectively pirating the work of the one and only Mike Masnick.
> “I think it’s wonderful that Lilly Allen found so much value in our Techdirt post that she decided to copy — or should I say ‘pirate’? — the entire post,” Mike told TorrentFreak on hearing the shocking news.
The anti-piracy creators demand that we stay within their narrow definition of "piracy", which just so happens to exclude the work that they steal. Yes, the creative agency behind the "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" ad are disconnected from the cause. And their clients at the MPAA and FACT do not consider fonts to be worthy of the protections that are ostensibly the basis of their existence.
0: https://torrentfreak.com/file-sharing-heroine-lilly-allen-is...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Wouldn%27t_Steal_a_Car
Fonts are also written in domain specific languages, I need to experiment with whether LLMs can author or modify fonts.
I do not think that the ridiculous terms that font and clip art and stock photo companies now offer, is going to be a viable business model in a couple of years.
We will all be able to use (for example) “LLM Helvetica Free” without any license.
It is quickly turning into one of these things that there are laws for, and everyone thinks it is rediculous, it is never enforced and DE facto not a law.
And what a shame that is.
Its a good gimmick if you can get it.
Oh, and tell it to fix the kerning.
This sounds very critical, but I assure you, these are my people. I rather find it very reassuring, even a little charming.
Don't ever change HN.
But you can copyright a font name, so if someone copies your work and releases it under a new name... that's that's like creating a copy of the car piece by piece and giving it your own name.
So they were right: we not downloading a car, we never were. We were all just making copies.
Sort of off-topic, but interesting engine, which I never heard about (wasn't ever mentioned on HN either: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Iceshrimp):
>Iceshrimp is a decentralized and federated social networking service, implementing the ActivityPub standard.
https://iceshrimp.dev/iceshrimp/iceshrimp.net
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg
I was under the impression that fonts are just a collection of line arc/points.
So is this a probabilistic comparison in that, if all of the line arc/points match another font - the chances are high it was ripped?
URL with %s in place of query: https://www.google.com/search?q=intitle%3A%22index.of%22+(tt...
Now, every single font in the font folio is free with a $30./month Adobe sub.
Remember kids: information wants to be free!
I never entered in a contract with you, producer of goods or innovation, you have no right to forbid me from copying anything.
You may prevent your own customers from facilitating access of non paying customers to their goods (by making them sign a contract) and even persecute them in a civil court (for breach of contract).
The fact that governments allow copyright owners to censor information on the internet to protect their commercial interest is just absolutely insane and incredibly damaging to the freedom of circulation of culture and ideas.
To clarify: the original font is named "FF Confidential" (which the post doesn't even mention).
The seemingly illegal clone is called "XBAND Rough".
Air quotes - “it’s obviously the fault of the person who cloned the font and the general public needs to be protected against such content” - end air quotes.
At the same time, it doesn’t have to be productive, it’s funny enough.