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230 Comments
- sumrandommember, on 10/12/2007, -31/+254You really should warn that this is a link to a PDF...
- DavisFreeberg, on 10/12/2007, -3/+84Is it just me or does the "European Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market" sound like a government division straight out of 1984.
- AssProphet, on 10/12/2007, -9/+64if you're using Adobe Acrobat to read pdf on a pc, try foxit reader http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php. It's way faster and a small download.
- geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -11/+48"Do you mean how both Apple and MS copied the idea of a GUI from Xerox?"
Your argument is old and tired, and only partially factual. Apple paid $1 million US dollars for a tour of the Xerox PARC facility, and a one-time license to any technology they learned through that tour. Microsoft worked with Apple on producing software, then Microsoft turned around and released an internally replicated version of Macintosh that ran on commodity IBM Compatible machines.
The fact is, whoever tells the story makes the other guy out to be an ass. They both copied designs, but one paid for it (Apple), the other did not (Microsoft). - fitchmicah, on 10/12/2007, -14/+47Arial and Helvetica aren't very similar, and both are freaking sans serif... this is ridiculous. People get mad that intellectual property rights exist until Microsoft breaks the rules. Look, I can see if they had copied some creatively made font exactly, but this is the plainest font in the world man.
I don't know how I feel about this. Some fonts are way overpriced. I'm going to start making my own. - kevnaca, on 10/12/2007, -7/+36If you don't have Adobe Reader 7 there is a splash screen that takes forever to load.
- cybernetic798, on 10/12/2007, -18/+42What the ***** hell do you mean copying an entire OS?!?! Do you mean how both Apple and MS copied the idea of a GUI from Xerox? If you are talking about Vista then you are out of your mind (fanatical more like) since Vista is most definitely not a copy of any code and there are no rumors indicating this either.
- johndoe667, on 10/12/2007, -8/+31> history repeats itself yet again
Much earlier MS font plagiarizm scandal:
Leading type designers consider the well known Windows system font Arial to be identical with Helvetica! - thechitowncubs, on 10/12/2007, -6/+26How hard is it for a multi trillion bagillion dollar company to create their own font for one of their most profitable products? This is ridiculous.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+22COMPARISON:
http://www.hardcovermedia.com/lab/articles/fruseg.htm
Lots of other information on the issue of Microsoft copying fonts (apparently this is the third time--your favorite Arial was the first). Also, the link I gave is from 2003. Quite old news, isn't it? - ifonly, on 10/12/2007, -6/+25you know what was funny? I posted this 255 days ago:
http://digg.com/design/Microsoft_Ripped_an_Existing_font_for_their_Vista_logo_ - kaje, on 10/12/2007, -5/+24No it's like holding rights to an image. Fonts are a bunch of images you created to represent letters for any language.
- mohrr, on 10/12/2007, -2/+20The title says Microsoft was found guilty of something. The summary says Microsoft was denied a trademark by some government office. Obviously, the story is only referring to one of these, so I'm marking it inaccurate.
- andreux, on 10/12/2007, -2/+18> Leading type designers consider the well known Windows system font Arial to be identical with Helvetica!
not identical but an ugly knock-off:
http://www.ms-studio.com/articles.html - glassjoe, on 10/12/2007, -12/+28* spits out coffee *
those bastards!!! - ryan, on 10/12/2007, -7/+21xiongchiamiov,
Apple+/ for status bar. ;) You just forgot to turn it on. - scaaven2, on 10/12/2007, -3/+16They weren't "found guilty" of anything...
- kaje, on 10/12/2007, -9/+22Safari has a status bar.
You just have to be smarter than the browser you're using. - mikm, on 10/12/2007, -4/+15But the O's are both ROUND. Clearly Microsoft stole that ideas from Apple or something.
- plasma, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11Microsoft didn't copy DOS either. They (Bill) bought the rights to QDOS for $50,000. Probably the best 50 grand ever spent.
- D4V1S, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12shouldn't it be called, forging, a font? instead of plagiarizing
- cybernetic798, on 10/12/2007, -3/+12Here is the comparison:
http://www.hardcovermedia.com/lab/articles/fruseg.htm - spam4jan, on 10/12/2007, -4/+13guess what, there are people that make their living making fonts/typefaces. and yes it can be very hard and difficult work. Microsoft got called on the fact that they didn't want to (or couldn't) get licensing for using the fonts so they went out and copied it, very shamelessly from what it seems. This is the same type of thing if say N-Sync came out with a song that was an exact copy of the New Kids on the Block and they tried to pass it off as their own, not a cover, not a remix, their own.
- jay314, on 10/12/2007, -14/+23You guys really need to quit your bitching about PDF links. If they crash your browser, then either get a new browser or submit a bug report. If you don't want Acrobat loading, tell your browser to present a download dialog for PDF links. If you don't like your PDF reader, then uninstall it or get a new one. Yes there are non-Adobe ones.
If you just like bitching, then grow up. - ntwrkguy, on 10/12/2007, -5/+14a font is someone's creation, and if someone else uses it like this case, it's a form of stealing.
- ThinkFr33ly, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10Font-Makers? Are you kidding me?
Spend 30 seconds researching the creation of unicode fonts that support scaling and smoothing and then come back and apologize for being stupid and modding me down.
And no, I'm not being extreme. It does indeed cost millions of dollars to produce a font as I described. - ricodued, on 10/12/2007, -4/+12You know, most of the people in this thread are kind of making me giggle.
You guys attack the RIAA when they try to protect their members' work (be they paid well for it or not), which is well within their rights, but when Microsoft makes a font that is similar in shape to some plain font but thicker, you guys all jump to the side of copyright laws.
So bury me, hypocrites. - ElectricGrandpa, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11"leading type designers consider the well known Windows system font Arial to be identical with Helvetica!"
They aren't identical, they definitely have their differences(although most people would say arial's changes are for the worse). - osirisx01, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11From who exactly?... They make their source code open to most major developers, it would have been long revealed.
- tecmec, on 10/12/2007, -16/+23I believe he is referring to DOS. But that's okay, I wouldn't expect many digg users to understand. *preparing to get buried*
- c.trinity, on 10/12/2007, -7/+14That's just another punch in the nuts from EU,because Microsoft doesn't want to comply with the rules.
And they'll keep kicking.... - DigitalDud, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Yeah, Microsoft spent millions creating two Japanese fonts in Vista in multiple weights, for the first time. There are over 60,000 characters in a Jap font by the way. And all are hinted for the ClearType renderer.
- tacom8, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8"The second strike was of course Book Antiqua, the sensationally scandalous Palatino clone that shipped and still ships with Microsoft Office"
wow i have got to find a way to work that into my next conversation.... - olegk, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7"software patients" :) lol
- electronicmaji, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7again http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font#Legal_aspects_of_typefaces
"United States law does not permit the copyrighting of typeface designs"
You cannot copyright a font.. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -5/+11Just another flaw in the Digg system.
- celerate, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Is it really a worthwhile investment? At that point they could just license someone else's fonts as long as they weren't worried about other operating systems also being able to do that.
- archangelnz, on 10/12/2007, -6/+12Isn't this copyright infringement rather than theft?
- Lacrossedragon, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9Wouldn't this be Microsoft Employee found guilty? I find it strange that an entire company with some of the best lawyers did this...
- quinnk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I've been contacted on at least one occasion by font houses demanding to know if my use of a particular font was legitimate. Font creation is a genuine profession, and people need to be compensated for the time they put in at a task. Stock photography and imagery (i.e. clip art) is a similar case.
Font pricing is another issue, but most of these font houses operate in free markets where at least to some degree pricing is related to demand and another consumer-centric factors.
However, as a parenthetical note, I will add that cartels and monopolies, or even closed business models, do not receive my blessing (e.g. RIAA).
For the record, Corel's Swiss 721 is much, much more similar to Helvetica than Arial. The differences are restricted essentially to weighting of extenders and descenders, whereas at least Arial has some differences in curves, lengths, etc. But again, the bigger you are, the more people look at you, and this is simply the cost of doing business on the scale of Microsoft. - TheFoo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6The inaccuracy of this description is amazing. First of all Microsoft wasn't found gulity of anything. They tried to trademark something and it was denied. Why? because it was too similar to something already trademarked. It happens all the time with trademarks.
Secondly, look up the definition of plagarism and then slap yourself. Seriously, I'll wait. - ThinkFr33ly, on 10/12/2007, -6/+11I'm not sure if Microsoft copied Segoe, but I do know that creating fonts is EXTREMELY DIFFICULT.
It takes THOUSANDS of man hours and often times MILLIONS of dollars to create a modern font that fully supports type smoothing, high and low DPI rendering, LCD optimization, etc. It is INCREDIBLY complicated, too.
Think about it. Every single letter must be manually "adjusted" for a wide variety of DPIs and pixel sizes. At 72 DPI / 12px it might look great, but decrease that to 8 px at 300 DPI and all hell breaks loose.
The solution? Some of it can be done programatically, but the majority of it involves human beings manually entering "hints" for these resolutions. It makes my head hurt to even think about doing a font that supports more than just english!
So for those of you who scoff at fonts, it's only because you take them for granted and have no idea how hard they are to make. - MetalRemains, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8don't copy that floppy
- rakslice, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5"Microsoft found guilty of having plagiarized Vista font!"
Ug. Another quality headline... ;) Guilty? Plagiarized?
Plagiarism is the idea of wrongfully borrowing others' work and claiming it as one's own. This ruling doesn't say anything about plagiarism, because it isn't about the originality of the font, only its novelty.
Back at the beginning of '04, MS applied for an EU Registered Community Design (RCD) for the Segoe font, and it was granted. An RCD is sort of like a trademark in that it gives exclusive use of a design _in_commerce_. Like a patented invention, an RCD requires novelty, and can be invalidated by prior art. HD AG (current owner of LinoType?) applied at the end of '04 to have it declared invalid, and submitted as prior art the fact that it had sold a similar font prior to the application.
The prior art was accepted, as it was deemed to show that the design had insufficient novelty to qualify for an RCD, and so the RCD was declared invalid.
This order doesn't mean that Microsoft was found to have wrongfully borrowed the font, to have claimed it as its original work, or to have borrowed it at all. (Didn't AGFA/MonoType create the font, and don't they regularly license fonts to Microsoft?) Nor does it mean that HD AG could get an RCD for the font if they had applied for one at the same time: A quick scan of some typographic discussion boards suggests that there are plenty of fonts -- probably all derived from Frutiger -- that might be similar enough to remove its "novelty" by that time.
Now, why would Microsoft have filed for the RCD? Maybe they were just prospecting for rights, or misguidedly following standard company policies, or maybe they just thought they had found a convenient way to get trademark-like protection on a font they would be using for Vista promotion.
In any case, I don't think it has anything to do with whether the font was wrongfully copied or not.
See, in the US, the copyright protection of outline fonts is murky. Letterforms themselves are not copyrightable (so for instance, if I want to photocopy a document I've written, I don't have to get permission from the font owners first.) Because of this it's always been a toss up as to whether to consider the data in computer fonts to be just more letterforms, or to consider it to be rightfully authored software that can be executed to produce the letterforms, which actually would be subject to copyright. (To me, this is a good example of the arbitrary nature of the inclusions an exclusions in copyright law, and really of how difficult it is to get a coherent policy about "intellectual property" out of ethical concepts like rightful authorship and being paid fairly for one's work.)
Anyway, the only reason I bring it up is that it wouldn't suprise me if few people at Microsoft actually think that copying a font (and maybe trying to modify it enough to make it novel) is wrong in any significant way.
Oh, and about "Guilty": It's difficult to be found guilty of something that isn't actually a crime. Now I realize that JohnDoe probably only meant it metaphorically, but for digg's sake, libel suits don't bother with such pleasantries. - joelhardi, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8fitchmicah, you missed the point. Microsoft *registered* a trademark for a font that it did not create, and in fact blatantly copied. This is about stopping Microsoft taking credit for a (recent) font design that it stole. Linotype didn't start anything.
Arial is a bad rip-off of Helvetica. If Microsoft wants to do a bad interpretation of Adrian Frutiger and copyright an ugly knockoff of Frutiger, they're totally free to do it. There are no patents on fonts. This just says they can't slap their own copyright on someone else's work. - saska, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6While I agree with the intent of your post, the phrase "rounder and more circular" made me laugh out loud.
Also, the L is straighter and more linear. ;) - antdude, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:BYNLfKsA0FkJ:oami.eu.int/PDF/design/invaldec/ICD%2520000000743%2520decision%2520(EN).pdf+&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1 for HTML version of the PDF.
- ckedge, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6I was going to complain about the pdf, but then I noticed that the pdf is only 150KB while the digg page is nearly 300KB (wtf is all that crap) and another 200KB of javascript. The PDF is tiny compared to loading and the javascript processing itself to hide the below-threshold comments.
- tacom8, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7I call BS, the lower cased "j"s, "g"s and "y"s do look slightly different... but then again at what point is it considered similar, and what point is it ripped off? I mean 90% of them look identical... and why am i arguing over fonts?
still worth investigating, somebody dropped the ball here - foolfromhell, on 10/12/2007, -8/+12The Mac PDF reader skips most Passwords, a PDF i got needed a password, opening it on friend's Mac didnt need a password
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