Sorry to keep on but I feel there is still confusion. Please correct me if I am wrong but my understanding of this issue is: 1. Glyphs are not copyrightable anywhere. Plenty of books abound with full sets of typeface glyphs with no hint of any copyright rules. Of course the book itself as a work bears it own copyright. 2. Collections of glyphs may be given a name which can be and often is a trademark. Thus type with terms like Helvetica, Univers etc become born again as Swiss, Humanist etc. when people copy the glyphs and do not wish to pay the original trademark owner. On the other hand common names such as Times may be used to describe collections of glyphs which are radically different, very few bearing any resemblance to Samuel Morrison's masterpiece. BTW if Arial is meant to be a copy of Helvertica its a shame they didn't copy the glyphs more faithfully! 3. Bitmaps which represent glyphs are no more copyrightable than the glyphs themselves although they may also be trademarked. 4. Many outline fonts are no more than a series of dimensions describing the glyph. This is just data derived from the glyphs maybe with some modicum of additional data such as kerning or spacing data. The old time punch cutters did nothing different. With due deference to the legal profession I can see no justification for calling this set of data a program as it adds nothing to the information contained in the basic glyph. The font file has no meaning standalone and has no input/output mechanism. It is not even a set of instructions for doing something. I think that even postscript fonts stretch the the term program too far as although they contain elements of a programming language they are still a set of data points. More complex multidimensional fonts perhaps maybe deserve the accolade. 5. The key component is a rendering engine which translates the font data into some recognisable form such as a printing press, printer or computer program. This is clearly a product requiring significant intellectual acumen and fully deserves full IPR protection. This is key to obtaining a high quality document. An electronic font file may contain instructions which inhibit the ability of the rendering software in some way but this has nothing to do with copyright. 6. Finally we have the output document whether printed or electronic. I believe it to be quite irrelevant as to whether the glyphs can be extracted from the document by electronic means or by scaling and tracing the printed page. Just extracting the glyphs does not take anything which has recognized intellectual property rights; not even the basic spacing, kerning and so forth can be determined. Nor for that matter can the mechanism used by the rendering engine to produce the document. Distributing a font with an electronic document is no different in principle that distributing it with a printed pages. The right to use a glyph collection with a trademarked name of course depends upon the owner of the trademark having given her permission and for this payment may have to be made. But if the user chooses to spend the time assembling a set of glyphs from that same family together under a different name there is nothing to stop this and no law is breached. Lynne. Marcello Perathoner wrote:
Lynne Anne Rhodes wrote:
I do not think there is any law anywhere in the world that restricts the unlimited distribution of pdf files containing any font that the generating program inserted.
Fonts are copyright-protected nearly all over the world and even if you cannot copyright a "typeface" in the US you can copyright the implementation of the typeface on a computer system.
That's the reason Microsoft did not just incorporate the Adobe "Helvetica" font in Windows, but made a tracing of that font called "Arial".
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typeface#Legal_aspects_of_typefaces
Embedding (the whole or a part) a font in a pdf file and distributing the pdf is legally the same as distributing the font (or parts of it). You can easily recover embedded fonts from pdfs with appropriate tools that ignore the "copy bits". Some companies (not all) allow to embed their fonts in documents, but you must buy a license for the font first.
Now BB writes on the front of his book "this book is in the public domain", but it contains copyrighted material.
He will get himself in trouble (which I don't give a damn) but he will also get in trouble those people who further distribute his "public domain" book. I don't believe he will financially backup the lawsuits those people may get into because of his carelessness.
As an afterword - we in polite society do not imply in a public forum that somebody is doing something improper without firm proof.
The proof is there for everybody to download. Open the file in Acrobat and type "Ctrl+Alt+f".
Its better to warn people than to get them in trouble with bogus legal advice.