IndoTimes Roman and copyright

[John Smith]

On Wed, 21 Jan 1998, Sfauthor wrote:

> In a message dated 1/21/98 6:33:16 PM, you wrote:
>
> >The second question I have is about (freely distributed) fonts (or fonts in
> >generall) and copyrights. If I change some characters of a font, like adding
> >characters to it, am I free to handle it as it were my own font ? Is it
> >possible to distribute this font for an e-journal ?
>
>
> To the best of my knowledge, fonts are not copyrightable. ("Mere" variations
> of the letterforms are deemed insufficiently original to merit protection.)
>
> Commercial fonts, however, typically come with license agreements. These
> agreements spell out what you may do with them. For a noncommercial font, try
> checking with the creator.

Oh, gosh. Fonts certainly are copyrightable: the legal position is complex
and varies from country to country, but you certainly can't change an
existing copyright font and then treat it as your own. The place to look
for info on this is the Font FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions). You can get
it in various places, but http://www.ora.com/homepages/comp.fonts/FAQ.html
is as good as any.

Very short quote from the beginning of very long discussion of this issue
in part 2 of the FAQ:

  It has been pointed out that this section deals primarily font copyright
  issues relevant to the United States and that this situation is not
  universal.  For example, in many parts of Europe typeface designs are
  protectable.

  "First, the short answer in the USA: Typefaces are not copyrightable;
  bitmapped fonts are not copyrightable, but scalable fonts are
  copyrightable.

In other words, "Times Roman" is not copyright (though it is a trademark),
but Adobe Times Roman is.  As well as copyright, there are issues of
licensing, patent (not very relevant) and trademark (applies to names of
typefaces).

Trying to be helpful and practical: there exist a set of high-quality Type
1 PostScript fonts which are copyright, but which are released under the
terms of the GNU General Public License, which permits them to be modified
and redistributed provided certain simple decencies are observed. These
are the Ghostscript fonts, available as part of the Ghostscript package
from large numbers of net servers.

My CSX and Norman fonts are based on these, and include TrueType and
PostScript versons for PC and Mac -- to find them, visit the WWW site
named below and follow the "fonts" link. If these don't do what you want,
you could roll your own: the same link will give you access to the program
(mkt1font) that I used to build the accented versions of the fonts.

John Smith

--
Dr J. D. Smith                *  jds10 at cam.ac.uk
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