Typeface - Intellectual Property

Intellectual Property

In Eltra Corp. v. Ringer, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held that typeface designs are not subject to copyright. However, novel and non-obvious typeface designs are subject to protection by design patents. Digital fonts that embody a particular design are often subject to copyright as computer programs. The names of the typefaces can become trademarked. As a result of these various means of legal protection, sometimes the same typeface exists in multiple names and implementations.

Some elements of the software engines used to display fonts on computers have or had software patents associated with them. In particular, Apple Inc. patented some of the hinting algorithms for TrueType, requiring open source alternatives such as FreeType to use different algorithms until Apple's TrueType hinting patents expired in May 2010.

Although typeface design is not subject to copyright in the United States under the 1976 Copyright Act, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California in Adobe Systems, Inc. v. Southern Software, Inc. (No. C95-20710 RMW, N.D. Cal. January 30, 1998) found that there was original authorship in the placement of points on a computer font's outline; i.e., because a given outline can be expressed in myriad ways, a particular selection and placement of points has sufficient originality to qualify for copyright.

Some western countries, including the United Kingdom, extend copyright protection to typeface designs. However, this has no impact on protection in the United States, because all of the major copyright treaties and agreements to which the U.S. is a party (such as the Berne Convention, the WIPO Copyright Treaty, and TRIPS) operate under the principle of national treatment, under which a country is obligated to provide no greater or lesser protection to works from other countries than it provides to domestically produced works.