I would go straight for the Arkell v. Pressdram response, but that might be because my patience for dealing with shit disappeared at some point over the last few years.
29th April 1971
Dear Sir,
We act for Mr Arkell who is Retail Credit Manager of Granada TV Rental Ltd. His attention has been drawn to an article appearing in the issue of Private Eye dated 9th April 1971 on page 4. The statements made about Mr Arkell are entirely untrue and clearly highly defamatory. We are therefore instructed to require from you immediately your proposals for dealing with the matter.
Mr Arkell’s first concern is that there should be a full retraction at the earliest possible date in Private Eye and he will also want his costs paid. His attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of your reply.
Yours,
Goodman Derrick & Co.
Dear Sirs,
We acknowledge your letter of 29th April referring to Mr. J. Arkell.
We note that Mr Arkell’s attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of our reply and would therefore be grateful if you would inform us what his attitude to damages would be, were he to learn that the nature of our reply is as follows: fuck off.
Yours,
Private Eye
I have not nor am I ever likely to license or use Proxima Nova though.
I find it’s far easier to remember that we are all human when certain privileged individuals don’t act like everyone who isn’t in their tax bracket doesn’t even matter.
At least a couple of those people, Tiffany Wardle and Sam Berlow (?), and Mark Simonson (and many others from the other foundries listed) were frequent and valued contributors to the, late and lamented, Typophile forums.
While one of the recurrent themes in the typophile discussions was the difficulty in persuading users to pay for licences, this seems wildly out of character with this aggressive and badgering policy, of course it is not always possible to gauge character online, but I do doubt that this is a scam.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it went something like this:
Typographers make fonts and wish people would actually pay them for it (and they aren’t wrong.)
Some people get together, form the TTF, and put forward a proposal: they will be licensing brokers. “You won’t have to worry about it, we’ll organise the deals, we’ll follow up, we’ll take care of all of that, and our small cut will more than be made up for in the time we’ll save you dealing with it all, so you can make more fonts!”
They may actually make some backroom deals, introduce some small foundries to Adobe, sort of thing. But I suspect most of the foundries already had deals with Adobe and other font clearing houses, as well as their own licensing systems.
In an effort to look like they’re actually contributing something, TTF goes and searches for people using the fonts of the foundries they represent. And send threatening letters to the ones they can’t verify are licensed.
But font licensing is complicated, and there are multiple paths through which people can buy these licenses, so how do you definitively say that someone is licensed or not?
They declare definitively that they’re nice people, and they’re willing to overlook this (asserted) failure to license the font properly, and it doesn’t matter than you bought it through Adobe, or from the foundry directly, there are very important subtle reasons why you’re doing it wrong and you just have to pay us $400 and we’ll clear it up and tell you how much you should be paying.
Some customers/font users pay up (thus justifying the business model).
Some call the bluff and say “bring it.”
Others will declare it not worth the confusion: how can they trust that they won’t get another round of this nonsense later? And how can they trust any other font from anyone else that’s listed on the TTF’s site? Simpler to just avoid the whole mess.
On legal advice, and after word gets around, fewer and fewer large clients will buy any font from any foundry listed as under the TTF’s protection, because you can’t trust that the TTF won’t show up with threatening letters later, whatever you think you’ve done to satisfy the agreement that you signed with someone else and doesn’t mention these people anywhere.
TL;DR: My suspicion is that whatever value they’re trying, or claiming, to add to the process, what they’re doing will result in lower business for their “clients”.
I agree with your hypothesis, I am still surprised that the people who put their name to it are agreeing to act in this way. I also wonder if there is a recent advance in searching for potentially unlicensed font use (AI I presume) that generates the threats. I do not design for web so I am largely unaware of the nuances of hosting and licensing in this sphere.
In terms of paying, it might be that the horse has bolted, too many designers/agencies/clients are convinced that typefaces are, once acquired, theirs to do what they want with. Whereas it takes type designers many months and years to develop a typeface to go to market which need to be rewarded (my experiments in this take years of spare time fiddling, even though I am not trying to produce a commercial product).
