Rib Apr 23, 2025
Today Melissa Lewis over on BlueSky pointed out that the font used in the infamous "You wouldn't steal a car" anti-piracy campaign was actually designed by Just van Rossum, whose brother, Guido, created the Python programming language (bsky.app/profile/melissa.news/post/3ln7hx5rhcj2v)

She also pointed out that the font had been cloned and released illegally for free under the name "XBAND Rough". Naturally, it would be hilarious if the anti-piracy campaign actually turned out to have used this pirated font, so I went sleuthing and quickly found a PDF from the campaign site with the font embedded (web.archive.org/web/20051223202935/http://www.piracyisacrime.com:80/press/pdfs/150605_8PP_brochure.pdf).

So I chucked it into FontForge and yep, turns out the campaign used a pirated font the entire time!
Melissa Lewis (@melissa.news)

TIL: The 2000s piracy PSA used a font designed by the fantastic Just van Rossum, whose brother Guido created the Python programming language. https://fontsinuse.com/uses/67480/piracy-it-s-a-crime-psa

Bluesky Social
Show threaddigital_star.sys šŸ’¾ā­Apr 23, 2025

@Rib FWIW, technically speaking, you canā€™t really copyright a digital font in that way; to say it was ā€˜piratedā€™ isnā€™t really true. cloned? sure. fully legal? yeah, pretty much

the way font copyright works is that you can copyright the software but not the actual design of the type. in this case, ā€œFF Confidentialā€ is copyrighted as software. If I were to trace it, or make a very very close imitation of it, and then made a digital font out of it myself, it would, in all likelihood, be in the clear

Show threadMrC

@oracle @Rib Fonts count as software and have licenses.

(Source: I've bought thousands for fonts for my day job and have dealt with the fallout when someone uses a font without asking me to license it first)

Apr 23, 2025 at 6:57pmWeb