CompuServe Messages

The Copyright Office decision may be new, but the problem is OLD and predates things like PostScript. Assume for a moment you have full copyright protection on a font you create. Somebody else produces an almost identical font. You try to sue for breach of copyright. The problem becomes – "IS THIS FONT DIFFERENT???". Thicken a few strokes by a pixel; make serifs a little pointier or blunter, and poof! you have a new font that to the ordinary user (or even a typographer without a magnifying glass) looks the same as the old. About the only thing you can protect is the name, by trademark laws. Hence Helvetica, Geneva, Swiss, and Univers are pretty d–n close to the same thing, but different manufacturers created them. (I work in the Printing Services dept., Univ. of Alberta. I still not-so-fondly remember a day a few years ago where I got yelled at by a customer because I called a particlar font one name, but she figured it should be called something else because company x "stole" it from company y).