It’s safe to assume that most people have no idea that fonts, like music or movies, are protected by intellectual property laws, they usually come with a hefty price tag, and they are uncommonly vulnerable to unjust adaptation and outright theft.

This makes sense if you think about it. Type always has been a popular commodity, and its profusion across our digital devices has only boosted demand. Typefaces are of monumental importance in the mobile era, essential both as a means of clearly communicating information and distinguishing one app or website from another. Even people beyond the design world have grown familiar with the stylistic differences of type design, and increasingly selective about the fonts they use. This fluency, appreciation, and preference have conspired to turn type design into a lucrative business.

It is hard to say if rates of plagiarism and outright piracy have increased, but this much is clear: In an era when files can be shared with the click of a mouse and anyone with a computer is an ersatz typographer, copyright infringement has never been easier to commit. The laws protecting type are weak at best, but designers are fighting back with lawsuits and purchasing models aimed at dissuading theft and converting would-be pirates into customers.

What Makes a Font?

There are tens of thousands of typefaces, ranging from the Times New Roman and Calibri found in every word processing program to more specialized fonts like Apple's San Francisco and our own font, Exchange, which you're reading right now. Designing typefaces used to involve working with wood and metal to create movable type. These days, the process is largely digital. That doesn't mean designing and manufacturing a new typeface is any less challenging. Specialized software called font editors help streamline the creative process, but designing a typeface from the ground up remains a difficult and time-consuming affair.

Hoefler&Co

Consider the work of Jonathan Hoefler, founder of type foundry H&Co. Whether working from a 16th century printing type—like the one that inspired Quarto—or the style of sign-making that gave rise to Gotham, the primary typeface of Obama's presidential campaigns, Hoefler and his team never create a “new” font by directly modifying an old one. Instead, says Hoefler, “We explore the ideas behind a collection of physical artifacts, and interpret them as a family of digital fonts.” In other words: When H&Co turns to an historical typeface for inspiration, its designers don’t just redraw it. Where an uninspired type designer might trace an old font and add a serif, Hoefler’s team will deconstruct a reference typeface, study the elements that make its letterforms unique from an aesthetic or structural standpoint, then reassemble it in a unique way.

That’s not to say type designers don’t model new fonts after old designs. These are what are called “revivals.” Frank Martinez, a New York intellectual property lawyer specializing in type design cases, says the primarily rationale behind a revival “is usually to create a digital version of an otherwise unavailable typeface.” This is often necessary, because older typefaces tend to harbor quirks that arose from the mechanical constraints under which they were created. Nuances in form that were acceptable when printing on a letterpress, for example, might appear sloppy on a crisp, high-definition display. Even modern, digital typefaces often can be improved or expanded upon, says Dan Rhatigan, freelance type designer and former art director at Monotype. “In short, if we base a new product on an older design, it’s because that design wasn’t enough, in some way,” he says.

James Montalbano, the Brooklyn-based founder of Terminal Design, compares his trade to the fashion business. “Every designer should have their version of the little black dress, the three-piece suit, formal wear, casuals, etc.,” he says. “Type design is no different—there are basic historical genres that underpin all type design.”

Anatomical closeups of various Quarto letterforms. Quarto Medium and Quarto Medium Italic.

That’s the thing about type design: Like all artistic endeavors, it always has relied on derivation—but ingenuity is essential, too. “There’s a lot of room for originality, on many levels,” says Hoefler, and that originality requires a major investment on the part of the designer. Creating Quarto, despite having access to plenty of source material, took nine years. “Compare the process behind a project like Quarto,” he says, “with the act of generating a typeface by beginning with someone else’s fully realized font.”

When you understand what goes into creating a typeface, it becomes clear why type foundries charge for their designs. Today, digital font packages are commonly licensed for web use, or for installation on one or more computers. Prices vary considerably, depending on the typeface and foundry in question. A company might charge $99 for permission to use a specific typeface on the web, or $1,000 to install a font on, say, 20 computers. But commissioning a brand new, custom typeface can cost upwards of $50,000 per face.

It’s also easy to see how piracy or plagiarism could be tempting. Making a font is hard. Stealing a font, or tweaking an existing font and calling it your own, is much easier.

It's Easy Being a Pirate

Plagiarism and theft are easy because the US doesn't have specific, quantitative definitions or standards dictating just how much a typeface must be altered before it qualifies as a "new" font. Similarly, there are no copyright laws protecting the design of any given letter, style, shape, or brushstroke. Oh sure, there are some firm rules: you can't use a trademarked name like Quarto to describe your ripped-off font, and you can't use the same code or software as the original designer. But these are small hurdles to a determined copycat. “If a design is perceived as successful,” Montalbano says, “someone will attempt a knockoff.”

Piracy is even easier to commit. Never mind hackers—designers have been known to steal fonts from their own companies’ libraries. Online, freely accessible font archives like DaFont regularly list knockoff versions of original designs under modified names; while sites like The Pirate Bay provide easy access to massive typeface collections—some with upwards of 65,000 fonts.

“If a design is perceived as successful, someone will attempt a knockoff.” James Montalbano, Terminal Design

It wasn’t always this easy. Digital type piracy started slowly in the 1980s, around the time fonts began making the leap to computers. But things picked up in the early 1990s with the transition to the modern internet. In 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act made it easier for type foundries to issue takedown notices to freeloading websites. Those who refused, says Carima El-Behairy, co-founder of P22 Type Foundry and a veteran of piracy wars, “became liable of hosting illegal software.” Such policing soon became Sisyphean, though.

Lawsuits are another option, though information surrounding copyright infringement cases is usually hard to come by. Most designers interviewed for this story, for example, declined to name those they had sued or the penalties agreed upon, citing confidentiality clauses in their settlements. But every once in awhile, one of these cases pops up in the news.

To Catch a Pirate

In 2009, The Font Bureau, one of America’s leading type foundries, sued NBC Universal for failing to secure the rights to a handful of its trademarked fonts—fonts the media giant had used to promote programs like The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live.

According to the Society of Publication Designers, Font Bureau argued that NBC paid for just a single license—which permitted the company to install the typefaces on a single computer—and the rights to a limited number of fonts. “But NBC went ahead and copied the fonts to a bunch of other computers within the company,” SPD reported, “and also started using several other fonts for which licenses were never obtained.”

It was a big case. Font Bureau asked for "no less than $2-million" in damages. It argued that NBC's unauthorized use "caused injury to Font Bureau's relationships with present and prospective customers" and would “cause confusion, mistake, and deception as to the source of Font Bureau’s trademarks,” making it more difficult to broker licensing deals with other companies. The case was settled out of court, as nearly all such cases are.

Rick Santorum's campaign website using Fedra. Fedra Serif Screen font preview from Typotheque. Fedra example text.

A similar scenario played out in 2012, when designers working on a campaign website for presidential hopeful Rick Santorum allegedly used a typeface called Fedra without paying for it. Peter Bil’ak—the founder of Dutch type foundry Typotheque and Fedra’s creator—accused Raise Digital of using an "unauthorized derivative version" of the trademarked font on Santorum’s site. Not only had they modified it ever-so-slightly, Bil'ak said the firm wasn’t licensed to use Fedra on the site. Bil'ak hired IP lawyer Frank Martinez, who argued that Raise Digital had deprived Typotheque of $2-million in fees.

The site ultimately was shuttered, and the lawyers worked out a no-cure-no-pay agreement. Raise Digital paid some legal fees, too. “But it was peanuts,” says Bil'ak.

Solutions

Of course, campaign website designers and media companies aren’t the only ones stealing fonts. Montalbano says many of them are "hobby/collector" or DIYers, whose decision to pick and choose from font-sharing websites presupposes a social license to access all web assets for personal use. “I do think that there is an ‘everything on the internet should be free’ attitude,” he says.

El-Behairy, of P22 Type Foundry, believes there’s another psychological factor at play.

“I think it is laziness,” she says. “Why should [users] license the original if it is available for free? There is a prevailing attitude that fonts do not have the value of other software, so why should they pay for it?”

She believes font-sharing sites should suffer stiffer penalties when they’re caught with pirated software, but Bil’ak takes a more pragmatic view. Laws, he says, cannot change human nature, so the onus is on designers to rethink how fonts are licensed. “The only way to fight the piracy is to make alternative products more accessible and affordable,” he says. He's described his company, Fontstand, as “the iTunes of fonts.” The goal, he says, is to allow users to try fonts for free, or rent them on a monthly basis.

Meanwhile, Rudy VanderLans, co-founder of Emigre Fonts and a dogged opponent of copyright infringement, admonishes students and businesses alike: “Don't steal from others. I know it's not that simple, but if you absolutely have to ‘appropriate’ the work of others, and you're in doubt whether it's legal, ask for permission. You'd be surprised how easy that is, and how it can be mutually beneficial.” Like Bil’ak, VanderLans says he would rather find reasonable ways to make his fonts available through short-term rentals and other means than endure the costly consequences of piracy. Many would-be infringers, he believes, are future customers in disguise.

“Greed plays a smaller part than ever before,” says Rhatigan. “It’s usually a case of ignorance about licensing and copyright, or laziness about how to go about exploring a twist on an existing design," he says. “Overzealous thrift is probably more to blame now that it is so easy to copy digital data, and so temptingly easy to just open up a file and begin tinkering with it to make it something else.” That’s the double-edged sword of digital magic—what is old can be manipulated to become something either amazingly new or dubiously borrowed. The line between those two can be vanishingly small.