Re: Typographic copyright (was: Emory HTML claim)

At 06:15 AM 3/20/96 -0800, you wrote:
>
>> a document using that font without permission to use the font? If I
>> want to photocopy a journal article, do I now have to worry about
>> identifying and contacting the font owner as well as the author for
>> permission?

Martin Perlberger:
>
> Why not? What is the difference with quoting a line from a poem in
> an otherwise unrelated article?
>

Actually, I think I asked the above question.

Here's one thought, for what it's worth: by copyrighting the font, I may impose a cost (or an ability to block the transaction) on people who have no interest whatsoever in using the font, simply because copying technology today generally makes a faithful visual reproduction of paper works. To avoid my copyright, they would have to retype rather than photocopy a work, even though they get no value from using the font.

Maybe Dennis Karjala will like this -- if you want to raise the costs of copiers of public domain material, just print the material in your own copyrighted font! They can't scan it directly; they'll have to retype it by hand. But I think there are many cases where we don't want to impose such a cost, and I don't know that encouraging font proliferation is worth it in the long run.

Mark Lemley
Assistant Professor, University of Texas School of Law Of Counsel, Fish & Richardson, P.C.
mlemley[_at_]mail.law.utexas.edu Received on Fri Mar 22 1996 - 23:02:26 GMT