Great explanation of the lack of CR in fonts.
I’m not sure that emojis are similar enough to fonts that they are not copyrightable, but certainly given their simplicity the extent of the copyright in emojis would be thin. Although if FB started with the Bitmojis and modified them they might have an issue.
Arial is not an exact copy of Helvetica.
yes communication tends to be cultural and contextual.
“Proper” language can be ambiguous.
Again… proper language has this too. Literally any criticism you can fling at informal speech is true of any proper speech. Because all forms of communication are inherently flawed.
If you don’t like it or care to use it, that’s fair enough, but making assumptions that the person your communicating with is inherently inferior because of the way they communication is flat out ignorant. And let’s not forget that if something isn’t clear, you can always, you know, ASK the other person.
TLDR, All forms of communication can be unclear [sorry, I apparently did not finish that thought…].
I despise Facebook and emojis as well (which may be explained by being 50) but surely, making changes to anything is a way to avoid copyright. It’s basically the same strategy that sympathetic actors have used.
You are technically correct (which is the best kind of correct!) In America, Arial(R) could have legally been an exact replica of Helvetica(R) and not been in violation of Linotype’s copyright, but U.S. law is not world law. Some of the differences can certainly be attributed to a designer wanting to improve upon one of the most popular fonts of the era, but it’s also possible that differences were intentionally included to allow Arial(R) to be distributed in countries where font glyphs are protected by copyright.
effect, “if you’re designing something that looks any different than this, you’re going to have to justify why”
I’ve been in many meetings where this was said, and I work at a company that does the sort of copying shown in this post. The reasons are simple: data and risk.
We’re trying to build things very fast that are guaranteed to succeed because we have a lot of investors to pay back and the CEO needs a second boat. The way you do that is by looking at your competitors’ data (which we have ways of getting) and copying whatever they did that is successful. This includes UX, UI, art styles, color stories, fonts, all of it. Then if you’re successful you can iterate away from it later. But you always start with what you know is going to work.
“But it’s so much better to innovate and differentiate!” Innovation is likely to fail and customers don’t want differentiation, according to the crappy unscientific surveys we do.
How ever bad you think tech companies are, it’s worse. Much worse.
It makes me cringe to think of all the iterations they must’ve gone through, only to arrive at this carbon copy.
Are you willing to engage with my argument that emoji, memes and gifs exacerbate certain tendencies, rather than pretend I argued for the strawman that plain text was a perfect communication method?
OMG I can’t use them they just ruined her hairstyle what were they thinking
I used bitstrips too. Cool product. And yes I got all my comix back
I think worse offenders are the Bitstream Swiss families which are an even closer clone of Helvetica (which itself is closely related to Neue Haas Grotesk), with the added frustration of awful kerning.
A lot of the stylistic criticism of the earlier fonts are that they are based on hot metal and punch cutter’s decisions made at various sizes – the digitised versions are averages (at best) of the hot metal characters.
They probably started with exact copies and iterated until their lawyers said that their versions were different enough.
They have to be. It’s fascinating, really that you can’t just take a piece of type and scan it or duplicate it’s printing surface and there’s your digital glyph. They did try that in early digital fonts and they were always too thin and too sharp, because what we think of as the look of a typeface is defined by the softening of curves and the absorption patterns on paper as well. On the other hand you also can’t just scan a bunch of printed characters and redraw them. That just looks too idiosyncratic. (They tried that with the IM Fell types for example and it just doesn’t look too good in my opinion. Though that is a problem that is maybe not that pronounced for 20th century fonts as it is for those printed by hand on rag paper). Thus a copy of an existing (non digital) type always has to be an approximation.
I live in the constant fear that overuse of emoji will trigger a Helvetica Scenario.
They don’t have to be, they can be from original drawings or from the photoset liths, but often the easiest (less difficult) or the only, in the absence of the source materials, way of creating them is from a printed sample or from the punches. And of course they have to overcome the challenges of screen use with hinting and printing processes that require a different approach to choke and inktrapping. The new versions of Gill Sans and Joanna for example are from Gill’s drawings and notes.
“Artwork used in emojis become uncopyrightable because they are used in similar fashion to letters” is an interesting and novel argument! If anything a great example of “skirting copyright”, in intent, because the reason why typefaces cannot be copyrighted in the U.S. is the utilitarian similarity of letterforms from one typeface to the next.
Could Facebook establish that a glyph meaning “hello” irreducibly requires a “black-haired white girl with a grey jacket and a topknot popping in from the left with a simpering wave” as part of its utilitarian value?
I doubt it, but I know the cost of arguing otherwise is probably too crippling to bother.
This simplifies Cory’s position further than is reasonable. For example, Cory is an advocate of the Creative Commons, whose legal effectiveness depends upon strong enforcement of copyright.
In this example, copyright isn’t even being praised or supported – but rather pointed out as something that fails to restrain Facebook from an obviously unethical exploitation of other artists.
But this does get us to why copyright might reasonably be supported, in any given case, by people who are in general copyright-minimalists: when it restrains power and offers accountability to the weak.
I’m not a lawyer but unraveling “This can’t be infringement because we actually copied thousands of works, not just a single character” sounds like a lot of billable hours. But it does seem to get us closer to “these underling layers – hairstyles, eye shapes – are utilitarian characters, like glyphs in a typeface”
On the other hand if someone chooses to make an avatar of themselves as a black-haired white girl with a grey jacket and a topknot, it would not be strange if they looked similar in both platforms. Gestures and poses, like fonts, cannot be coprighted. Obviously Facebook has ripped off the process probably as a corporate spat, but it is Facebook why be surprised.
