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FontZone has an article on a high-profile font piracy case in which 11 foundries have brought charges against an internet user for uploading commercial font bundles to public websites and newsgroups. (The case was settled out of court earlier this year.)
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Marty, you may not have noticed but Napster is close to collapse, has been sued "up the wazhoo" and will never again be a free file trading site.
You should try reading that article a bit more closely. All the people concerned are small businesses, they don't expect to be "powerhouse money makers", they just want to get paid for their work. Sure you can download fonts for free on the net, and you can do so legitimately with many freeware or shareware foundries, but if you think any of those are really going to replace professionals in the graphics market then think again.
that article was horribly written. my sympathies to anyone who muddled through the entire piece.
Here's my problem with modern-day font designers: where is the use? Where is the creativity? Why on earth would I pay $60 for a Times New Roman lookalike? Oh, ok this one's an oldstyle font... fine, I'll use the Garamond that came installed on my computer; it was free with the OS. You should see some of the c*** type foundries (even the big ones like Adobe and ITC) are churning out these days and charging $99 for. The only ones who will tell the difference between Times New Roman and Bob's Nice Transitional Font are other typographers -- not the customer. Flooding the market with fonts that all look the same to the untrained eye serve very little purpose; I cannot justify the expense for Bob's Nice Transitional Font to my employer when I could use Times New Roman for free, and our customers won't see the difference.
Really, the only place left to expand in the font world is decorative fonts. Even then, these might work for a logotype or as a headline for a newsletter with a specific theme, but overall they will not get much use. The majority of new fonts being made will not find much use. So how can I justify paying $60-100 for a new font that I will only use once or twice? So what do I do? I don't buy your overpriced font and I use something else. So much for putting food on the table.
If you want to spend your life designing fonts, be my guest -- no one is stopping you from living your dream (I hope you paid for that copy of Fontographer, by the way). But being monetarily successful in any creative field is not a god-given right. I can paint all day, but that doesn't automatically entitle me to be paid for a crappy painting just because "I spend my whole life painting; this is my livlihood." But that seems to be the argument of a majority of font designers -- that because they spent a lot of time doing something, they deserve money for it, no matter what the product looks like, no matter how much the publisher will use it, no matter how long it actually took them to make it.
I'm not justifying Apostrophe/Fred Nader's actions, merely asserting the uselessness of the full-time font industry. An occasional new font now and then (one that is truly creative and hasn't been done 1000 times before) would be just fine, and in fact a welcome change from the status quo. You honestly expect to make a living at this? Go right ahead and sell Bob's Nice Transitional Font to your "trusted" publishers -- I'll stick to Times New Roman, thank you very much. Now before you go, would you like to buy a painting?
[stands up and begins applause] You couldn't have said it any better. . .
Here is a very interesting analysis from the man himself:
http://www.hardcovermedia.com/lab/Pages/Misc/PRTHIS.htm
Although slaving away creating fonts is no guarantee of success in any form, that still doesn't give anyone the right to ignore the intellectual property rights of the font creators. In spite of what he said, Mr 'Here's my problem' is trying to justify this piracy by saying "they (the creators) won't make money anyway, besides we can get fonts for free". He also tries using the "majority of font designers" as some sort of group he can create for us, then knock down at will.
Mr 'Here's my problem ', if you don't want to pay anything for a font, don't. It's really simple. You are not being forced to. Save your employer a bundle. If you do, however, then you have to pay. What is so hard to understand about this concept?
Although slaving away creating fonts is no guarantee of success in any form, that still doesn't give anyone the right to ignore the intellectual property rights of the font creators. In spite of what he said, Mr 'Here's my problem' is trying to justify this piracy by saying "they (the creators) won't make money anyway, besides we can get fonts for free". He also tries using the "majority of font designers" as some sort of group he can create for us, then knock down at will.
Mr 'Here's my problem ', if you don't want to pay anything for a font, don't. It's really simple. You are not being forced to. Save your employer a bundle. If you do, however, then you have to pay. What is so hard to understand about this concept?
Mr 'Here's my problem ', if you don't want to pay anything for a font, don't. It's really simple. You are not being forced to. Save your employer a bundle. If you do, however, then you have to pay. What is so hard to understand about this concept?
That was my point. I WON'T pay for a font if I'm not going to use it. Font designers *do* make money off of their products, obviously since they are still in business. I'm just not exactly sure *why* they are still in business. As I said in my post, I'm not justifying Apostrophe's (or any pirate's) actions; I'm just explaining why font designers shouldn't be surprised that people are reluctant to pay through the nose for a font that, to my firm's clients, is just a replica of Times New Roman with a different dot over the i. This has nothing to do with theft; I guess I got off topic there.
I have the same problem with much modern art -- sure, it might have taken you ten months to paint a black square on that canvas, but that doesn't automatically mean you should be paid $10,000 for it. Where is the originality and creativity? Besides, Mondrian painted a black square years ago!
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Joined: Oct 1999
The Napster of Fonts
When are these font guys going to learn to let it go. Font Foundries are no longer the powerhouse money maker they used to be since the advent of desktop publishing. Instead of getting into font software they want to continue to charge people out the wazhoo for fonts that you can get elsewhere for next to nothing. Fonts are like napster now.