Book People Archive

Linotype gets heavy over free ATM font downloads

[this may be too long a snippet--i wanted to get the most important
info in      jf]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23427.html

Posted: 17/12/2001 at 12:15 GMT | The Register

Linotype gets heavy over free ATM font downloads
By John Lettice
<john.lettice@[redacted]>

German company Linotype Library GmbH is flexing its ATM font
copyright muscles via 'cease and desist' letters with potential
$30,000 legal tabs attached. The fonts in question do seem to be
owned by Linotype (or to be strictly accurate, its parent company
Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG), but are probably part of a batch
that accidentally wandered into the shareware sector in the early
90s.

The fonts are frequently found for download on OS/2 sites, and have
tended to propagate via mirrors, with the assumption that they're
shareware propagating along with them. This was the case for Ian
Manners, who runs www.os2site.com, and who contacted The Register
after receiving his letter from Linotype.

<snip>
 .
 .
 .
And strangely enough, the fonts themselves (Cascade, Flora,
Frutiger, Helvetica, Isadora, Linotext, Linoscript, Optima,
Palatino, Peignot, Present, Shelley and Univers), are currently on
sale at Linotype Library's site <http://www.linotypelibrary.com> .

<snip>
 .
 .
 .
The Register is asking around to see if there's anybody else who's
had a heavy letter - let us know if you have.

[Moderator: Note that The Register and Linotype are in Europe,
 where fonts and typesetting have some degree of copyright protection.
 (Fonts themselves are not copyrightable in the US, though the software
 that produces them is.)  Europeans may thus need to be careful about putting
 online page-image scans of recent printings even of out-of-copyright
 texts, if the recent printings are newly typeset. - JMO]