In the 2000s, the DVD industry was concerned about piracy, in particular the threat to their business model presented by counterfeit DVDs and downloadable movies. Their response was a campaign which could be found embedded into the intro sequences of many DVDs of the era, in which an edgy font on a black background began with “You wouldn’t steal a car.. “. It was enough of a part of the background noise of popular culture that it has become a meme in the 2020s, reaching many people with no idea of its origins. Now in a delicious twist of fate, it has been found that the font used in the campaign was itself pirated. Someone should report them.
The font in question is FF Confidential, designed by [Just van Rossum], whose brother [Guido] you may incidentally know as the originator of the Python programming language. The font in the campaign isn’t FF Confidential though, as it turns out it’s XBAND Rough, a pirated copy of the original. What a shame nobody noticed this two decades ago.
It’s a bit of fun to delight in an anti-piracy campaign being caught using a dodgy font, but if this story serves to tell us anything it’s that the web of modern intellectual property is so labyrinthine as to be almost impossible to navigate without coming a cropper somewhere. Sadly the people caught out in this case would be the last to call for reform of the intellectual property environment, but as any sane heads would surely agree, such reform is overdue.
If copyright gives you a headache, here’s our take on it.
“a pirated copy of the original”
When it comes to fonts, you need to define that in detail.
Intellectual property isn’t real in the first place. Copyright and patents should be abolished. No one should be granted an artificial monopoly over anything just because they made it first. Monopolies are bad, remember?
which basically takes the incentive out of building anything or creating anything. if it weren’t for the profit motive involved with patents, we wouldn’t have even got to the steam age.
why put years of your life into inventing something, if 30 seconds after you show it someone comes along and steals it?
Innovation and products would still happen, for sure.
This thing is happening inside China and it is just their normal standard. Strong ones will survive and those who loose, start over.
Yeah, this. The guys currently manufacturing the components for the modern world don’t seem to care about intellectual property, and it works for them. Why should I care about it either? Patents slow down progress.
They don’t care about IP because US, Japanese, and Korean companies do the innovation for them. That works for them!
Doesn’t work so well for most of the companies who do the development, and doesn’t work so well for indies who create something cool and stick it on tindie only to have it appear on AliExpress for a fraction of the cost. And it’s not just tech; fashion, dice, keycaps, … you name it.
Doesn’t work so well for manufacturers who can’t trust the quality of the parts they buy because of supply chains being flooded with fakes.
And whilst they like the cheap, it also doesn’t work so well for consumers who often struggle to find genuine product to buy, meaning they can’t support the original devs when they want to, and they often end up buying badly made unsafe goods.
I was gonna say that James Watt’s patents in fact stifled innovation, but https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/658495 (I only read the abstract) claims that is a hoax…
Even if you only invent things for the sake of money (which is lame, and you’re probably a bad inventor), who’s to say that the guy copying you is any good? You’ve got the practice at making the thing, because you designed it. Out-compete him in the market! Don’t abuse the force of law to grant yourself an unfair advantage.
yep, this is why open-source has been such a flop, with only 96% of codebases containing open-source code. there’s absolutely zero incentive to develop it.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/guide/the-careful-consumption-of-open-source-software.html
This isn’t a thing that happens. Individual inventors can’t afford patents nor can they afford to defend those patents if someone were to infringe upon them.
They’re 10s of thousands of dollars
” if it weren’t for the profit motive involved with patents”
Wrong. As soon as James Watt got his patent, innovation stood still for 20 years. Source: Against Intellectual Monopoly, Boldrin & Levine.
the problem isn’t the people that made it, those are the innovators the system was intended to help. its the 2nd..Nth party rights holders who plan to profit forever on work they didn’t do. i dont think either should be a commodity that can be traded, nor do i think either should outlive the original filer. im still ok with that filer being a company, in which case if the company folds, the copyright/patent expires.
Damn, i could have sworn the ad said “You wouldn´t download a car” ….. anyone else?
I remember “you wouldn’t download a pizza”, or some variation thereof.
So font ‘s property is annoying, same for copyrighted catchy phases, I mean anyone can spend some weeks being creative and making a cool font and when is finally ready ,you discover that someones has the rights of a very similar font. Saying it happens only in China is silly or politically biased.
This article ignores the fact that typefaces aren’t copyrightable in the United States, only specific implementations (e.g., a font file).
Is it irony or just sad? Not too long ago, I’ve learned the music used was inspired, as they didn’t want to pay for the original. Only to underpay the artist as they lied about how the music was going to be used. At this moment, I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea, clips, or other parts are stolen as well.