3D programs
Ah, I knew this ball of wax was going to appear. On the Amiga, there is a new
font manipulation program that can create different fonts very quickly. In some
respect, the fonts you create are derivatives of the font you started with.
The people who sell font disks want to protect their investment in developing
the fonts, but this new program doesn't give them much of a chance. If my
program converts and re-interprets the data in a copyright CAD-3D object, is
the result a derivative work? The best interpretation I've heard on the font
issue is that font names can be copyright, but the font itself can't. Thus
there are dozens of Helvetica look-alikes, but only one Helvetica. This
look-and-feel bugaboo keeps mutating, doesn't it? I'd like to hear more about
this. I do not plan on making or selling object disks, I only plan to make a
product that could be used to do such a thing… Meanwhile, I do know of
several people who planned to make object disks, and I've told them this same
story about the fonts.