More on the Electronic Distribution of Intellectual Property
posted by Dick Septic on March 2, 2002
All the talk about ripping MP3s and how it was taking money right out of the mouths of the artists who created the music got me to thinking...
Has anyone here ever stolen a font? i know i have; i'm guessing most of us have. Has anyone here ever offered anyone a font? Even a font that they had paid for? I have. Either of these instances is theft. Fonts are created by artists (typographers) and licenced by foundries.
There was a time when the creation of a workable typeface was an incredibly expensive process. There was design of the actual face involved, then molds were created, the forms were cast, the individual blocks were sanded, polished, oiled and purchased for a very expensive price. Presses prided themselves on the amount of typestyles they could offer a customer.
'Ye Olde Type House--Home of 6 type styles!'
With the birth of digital typography that all went to pot. All of a sudden ANYone could design a font, ANYone could copy and distribute a font, and worst of all ANYone could manipulate, distort, mangle and crucify hundreds of years of craftsmanship.
Your Aunt Betty can use Trajan, a face commisioned 2000 years ago to grace the tomb of Augustus, to write invitiations to her poodle Dupree's birthday party. She can even shape the text to look like Dupree! Augustus rolls over.
The carefully created work of master typographers was being distributed in giant software collections under wonderful names like Hermetica, New Cavalry Schoolbook, and Garamonderful. Words like kerning, leading, m-dash and descender were as misused and misunderstood as a soccer mom at a bathhouse.
Foundries responded by going digital, easing up on prices and relaxing on licenses. I'm not sure how succesful it is. I'll be more than happy to pay $39.99 for a face if I can; but a lot of people can't and won't.
True; we're talking about a vertical market here. Most people are happy with the 15 fonts that come wth XP. But the electronic distribution of intellectual property in ANY form is theft, right?