Comments on: Publisher purges thousands of unlicensed fonts

A London publishing house finds, and wipes out, hundreds of thousands of rogue fonts that could have cost it dearly in fines.

[rich966]

This makes no sense

Fonts should be free, what other purpose do you create a font for than to have people use it? Fonts aren't the intelectual property of one person, they are the collective property of society. This is liscensing gone crazy. Free the fonts and you will find that the best fonts are the most prolific. Heck you could even have a download page for teh font with ads on it, ads that might even use that font, if it is good enough. Make money the smart way, we are moving mroe and more to an ad supported world, where the end user finally benefits with the use of free things supported monetarily by the advertising companies that want to reach him.

Anything that isn't physically tangible and can be reproduced without any cost should be free.

Advertising companies who work for companies that want to sell physical things to the people using these intangible good and services should be the ones footing the bill.

Google, please continue taking over the intangible world.

[rich966]

Cell phones

Cell phone service should be the next arena in which Google obliterates the competition with this "novel" approach.

[Jim Harmon]

Tangibility is irrelevant

Just because you can't physically touch something doesn't mean that no work went into creating it.

Music is just one example. Music isn't tangible, but a lot of work goes into creating it. If no one's willing to pay for the creation of music, it's not going to be made.

Of course, this isn't necessarily a BAD thing in the cases of rap and hip-hop. :)

[Neotrope]

Makes total sense unless you steal content

What "everything is free" shouters forget is that a real person has to create art, fiction, film, photos, music or other works... and this is often done in personal time, but when it's done in lieu of a "day job" - it is the artist's sole form of payment for that time spent and the originality of the work created which is the innate personality of that person... it's what makes one person different from everyone else. If everything is free, and every flavor is the same because nobody wants to create anything, then it's a loss to us all as a culture. Speaking as somebody who has created an original font or three, where each letter was lovingly hand drawn large then scanned, then cleaned, then tweaked for paths, then expertly kerned, you're looking at sometimes hours per letter, per version. Meaning, a true italic vs oblique/slanted is a whole additional different drawing. So do the math, one standard medium/book font times 80 letters time five hours each, then add an italic, a bold, and perhaps a bold italic. 1,500 hours for a high-end professional font is not out of the realm of possibility. Divide that for a 40 hour work week, and then by any practical hourly wage and there is no logical claim that somebody should make for a pro level font being "free." Only the clueless and pir8s don't "get it" and think they should be able to steal whatever they want. Piracy takes away from artists, period.

[Renegade Knight]

Partially Right

Consider: What copyrighted font did they orginally use to publish the orginal Copyright law?

Somewhere between today and the invention of the printed word copyrighs crept into the mix. I'm glad that we at least got to read and write before it became an issue on fonts.

[galacticgufus]

i don't want to accidentally steal so

i have no wish to accidentally steal the fonts which you worked so hard on. but how am i supposed to know that you own a font by looking at it. i or anyone else might 'steal' (as the copyright nazis say) it without knowing. the only way that you can protect yourself from being defrauded and your enemy, the public, from accidental 'piracy' (as the copyright nazis call it) is to keep your useless 'intellectual' 'property' to yourself. keep in on your own computer. don't preinstall it on mine. don't release it to the world to be used just keep it completely to yourself and don't even tell anyone that you have it on your hd. then the evil pirate public will only use the fonts which were designed for mankind to use.