CompuServe Messages

Earl, If it is legal, then what makes it immoral? And would our copying those fonts and posting them here be any less moral than your producing and selling (for profit) a program which makes possible (and therefore, implicity, encourages) the copying of those fonts? I don't want to get into arguments about the "rightness" of Adobe selling a $.75 diskette and $1.50 worth of paper and packaging for $135 while many other companies are selling software with identical packaging and distribution costs for as little as $10 per package…I think that obscures the issue. But on the issue of _morality_ and _human_obligation_, while I understand that you could argue that copying fonts is "stealing" if you're copying the code, how would it be "stealing" if the companys know and understand that it is legal to copy "only the outline" and chose to operate in an environment filled with that possibility, and the courts say it is legal and not stealing, and your company is offering a commercial product to make it possible and easy? And, to take it a step further, was Adobe "stealing" when they picked a large percentage of their faces from other, previous libraries and vendors? (I seriously doubt they're paying any sort of royalty to the estate of Hermann Zapf. And I know that they did buy many of their fonts from Linotype, who did pay Herman, but many others of their fonts are not Linos, aren't they?) Is Bitstream "stealing" with their clones of Times, Helvetica, and nearly everything else? I don't understand the distinction. It seems that this is something that these companies _theselves_ have been doing for years! –Thom (trying not to sound combative, but really struggling with the issue of why it's ok for Adobe to copy other's fonts, but it's not ok for me to…) PS. I love your quote from Solzhenitsyn, but I doubt he was discussing commercial issues; as I recall his tone was more like JFK's "Ask Not…" quote and the spirit of the Peace Corps…