As the Business Software Alliance begins its latest crackdown on unauthorised use of computer fonts, Richard Brass wonders how many people even realise that a typeface is a form of IP

There have been better days at the Dutch publishing company Aristo Uitgeverij. One minute the staff were publishing merrily away, and the next they were being subjected to a courtauthorised search by the Business Software Alliance. A search which, the BSA says, turned up unlicensed fonts worth more than £35,000.
Whether anyone at the company even knew they were using those fonts without licence is another question. But that makes no bones to the BSA, the software industry’s IP guard dog, which is seeking damages and costs from the publisher, even though it accepts that at least some of the offending fonts appear to have been inherited unwittingly.

The case highlights the fact that, when it comes to public awareness of IP matters, the area of fonts is about as uncharted as they come. Most people would have some idea whether the music they’re listening to or the film they’re watching is stolen, and IT departments, at least, would know whether employees were using software packages without authorisation. But the thought that the fonts appearing on screen, on paper or on products even constitute IP is probably news to many.

The message is clear: make sure your fonts are licensed or we’re coming to get you. That’s likely to lead to more sudden raids by the BSA.

Times New Roman? Everybody uses it at some stage, everybody’s got it on their computers, so surely it’s as venerable and publicly available as Shakespeare’s sonnets? Well, no, actually. It was commissioned by The Times newspaper in 1931, designed by employees of Monotype, and if you use it you’re using Monotype’s IP.

Legally speaking
But even when you get it into your head that fonts are IP, the question of whether you’re using them legally can be baffling. For a start, IP law in different countries takes different views of fonts, and even keeping an assiduous eye on the latest court rulings in the field can do little to clear things up.

In the last few years alone, an English software publishing company has been successfully sued by Linotype Library for infringing its copyright on four typefaces; Monotype has failed in a copyright suit against rival font developer Bitstream in the US; open-source specialist Red Hat has settled a font copyright case brought by Monotype, and a struggling London publishing firm has been found to be using 11,000 fonts when it claimed to be using just one, a fact that came as a very unpleasant and expensive surprise to its new CEO.

Then there are the licences. There is no standard licensing arrangement for fonts, so each licensor has its own requirements, which differ sharply and can even vary depending on the nature of the licensee. By the time the end user starts tapping away with the font in question, the legal situation can be so mystifying that only a visit from the BSA’s heavies will clear it up.

And there could be a lot more of those visits coming up. The BSA has just published a guide containing a diverting history of fonts and inspiring information about how businesses can make them work best, but the real point of the document emerges in the 10 handy tips at the end, all but one of which relate to copyright. The message is clear: make sure your fonts are licensed or we’re coming to get you. That’s likely to lead to more sudden raids by the BSA, more court cases and more executives wondering quite what happened. And that should make things clearer for everybody.


This article first appeared in IP Review, issue 23

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