CompuServe Messages

Coincidental to all of this, there has been a very important ruling by the copyright office announced this week. Adobe has been granted a copyright related to is version of ITC Garamond Light. Note that I say "related." Traditionally, you have not been able to copyright the design of a typeface. There may be any number of reasons for this–including no doubt the fact that the folks at the copyright office probably couldn't tell the difference between a Garamond "e" and a Times "e." It has also been argued that copyrighting letterforms would be the same as copyrighting the alpahabet. That's ridiculous, of course, but it is related to the legal concept that while you can copyright the expression of an idea, you can't copyright the idea itself. About the only protection available to type designers was the freedom to trademark a font's name. As we all know, that's not much protection at all (witness Dutch and Swiss). A few years ago, however, the law was amended to allow computer programs (the acutal instructions) to be copyrighted. Adobe has now gotten the copyright office to recognize that the PostScript commands that describe a face are a program and can therefore be protected. (Adobe had some help from Bitstream on this: both revealed their code for ITC Garamond Light to demontrate that each was unique.) Adobe still doesn't have a copyright on the actual letter shapes. But we seem to have moved a step closer.