Comments on: Weekend Discussion Questions 6: Piracy

by: alex

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 06:25:32 +0000

I’m a student at high school, and in the last 2 years I’ve become increasingly intereasted in typography as a career choice. I’ve never download a typeface illegally from p2p persay, but i have recieved copies from some friends and a “mentor” of mine who works at a design agency.

Right now I love Whitney from HFJ, but the price for it so high. The only thing I’ve done that was released to a large audience were school newspapers, and several newsletters for a social activism group. For the newspapers, which print about 800 once a month i use Adobe Fonts from our school’s site liscense (Chaparall and Frutiger, boring I know), and for the newsletter I use Fedra Sans and Serif, the newsletter is printed in about 50 copies, and to properly liscense it would be too much. I received the type from a disk that I found at the printshop where i work partime, and bout it was ever even properly liscensed.

I can’t realy feel too bad about it since at 50 copies I don’t feel I’m cheating Peter Bilak out of much at all, besidess the paper goes to such a select audience that no one would find out. I know it may sound dishonest and horrible, but I recieve less that $1000 a year from holidays and such, and properly buying a $800 deal would be, well.

I did use GE Inspira once for an essay, but that and the social activism nl are the extent of my wrongfulness.

by: Jools

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 10:24:03 +0000

“If I had designed Cezanne and gotten $50 for it, then seen a firm like Starbucks splash it everywhere and make $50 million using it”…

… I would either

a) cover up for my dumbness in selling so cheap: “Daddy, such a great looking font on those coffe cups - which of your colleagues did it?” “Run along, children, coffee is of the Devil!”

b) make the most of its use by Starbucks: registering www.starbucksfont.com or use some other way of publicising as heavily as possible that I had done it. After all, I might even join the loucky few who get commissioned for designing fonts, which seems to be the dream of any font designer.

by: Jools

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 10:15:27 +0000

“The book industry could whine and cry because books purchased by libraries are read by dozens or hundreds of people, supposedly depriving them of profits. Rubbish.”

Fact #1: Rubbish indeed. Fact #2: The book industry does complain.

They should read the *book* about the chicken which lay golden eggs; they’re set up to kill the chicken. They could even loan it from a library…

by: EarthboundMisfit

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 01:16:57 +0000

Yes, I’ve dl’ed pirated fonts before, but not intentionally. It would be nice if there were an easier way to tell which were commercial, shareware, freeware, or whatnot. Unfortunately, I’m now trying to sort through my collection and weed out anything that isn’t free (or at least, free for personal use).
As for pirating, I just don’t understand it. If you want something that you’re legally required to pay for, simply pay for it or don’t use or collect it. It isn’t like there isn’t a bunch of freeware fonts already out there.

by: Jal

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 18:46:05 +0000

I don’t think so. I tend to get lucky and download things while they are free (if they are free for some time before they are made commercial), or I find a free font that is very similar to the commercial font. Works for me. To be honest, I haven’t gone around specifically searching for a copy of a commercial font.

by: Anonymous

Sat, 13 Aug 2005 17:52:02 +0000

Man, what a well set-up website!

by: Anonymous

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 10:35:07 +0000

Thank you for the great web site - a true resource, and one many people clearly enjoy

by: Anonymous

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 17:40:18 +0000

I just want you to know that I think you did a terrific job on this websight.

by: Shay

Mon, 18 Jul 2005 03:29:50 +0000

Looking through some stuff, I re-encountered a quote from Ismar David, famous for his beautiful modern Hebrew book font*.

“However I realize that a typeface design, if successful, becomes public domain. It becomes an image just as older styles which [THAT] we may admire or reject but by the nature of type become the input for other designers. I am only unhappy if as has happened someone lifts the design but calls it DOVID to shirk any responsibility for lifting.”

btw - one of the fonts included with the “Additional fonts” package of Mac OS X, is a copy of David, re-named “Raanana”. I wonder if that is better or worse than “Dovid”….

* A very good, and free (GPL-licensed) digitization of it, including it’s forgotten italics, is available as part of the Culmus project: http://culmus.sf.net/

by: интернет-маркетинг

Tue, 24 May 2005 19:55:31 +0000

The best!