Typefaces, fonts, and their glyphs raise intellectual property considerations in copyright, trademark, design patent, and related laws.
The copyright status of a typeface and of any font file that describes it digitally varies between jurisdictions.
According to German law, every typeface thus ends up in the public domain after no more than 25 years from first publication onwards, when it is also free to be digitized into a computer font, which in itself holds a much higher copyright protection status by German law than analogue typefaces because it is legally classified as a computer program.
[2] Courts in Israel have recognized copyright in Henri Friedlaender's Hadassah typeface for a term exceeding 48 years, forcing Masterfont's unauthorized digitization off the market.
That created the opposite situation in which all typefaces have copyright, and payments can be collected by current law.
[5] The Supreme Court of South Korea has ruled that typefaces are not protected by copyright because they function primarily as a means of communicating information.
The idea that typefaces cannot be copyrighted in the United States has been black letter law since the introduction of Code of Federal Regulations, Ch 37, Sec.
[10] The legal precedent that typefaces are not eligible for protection under U.S. copyright law was established before that in 1978 in Eltra Corp. v. Ringer.
Typefaces and their letter forms are considered utilitarian objects whose public utility outweighs any private interest in protecting their creative elements under US law, but the computer program that is used to display a typeface, a font file[a] of computer instructions in a domain-specific programming language may be protectable by copyright.
[14] Since that time, the Office has accepted registration of copyright for digital vector fonts, such as PostScript Type 1, TrueType, and OpenType[15] format files.
The 1976 House Report states: A "typeface" can be defined as a set of letters, numbers, or other symbolic characters, whose forms are related by repeating design elements consistently applied in a notational system and are intended to be embodied in articles whose intrinsic utilitarian function is for use in composing text or other cognizable combinations of characters.
The Committee does not regard the design of typeface, as thus defined, to be a copyrightable "pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work" within the meaning of this bill and the application of the dividing line in section 101 [H.R.
[18] Typefaces may be protected by a design patent in many countries (either automatically, by registration, or by some combination thereof).
As typeface shapes themselves cannot be copyrighted in the United States, the lawsuit centered on trademark infringement.
[19] Such licenses typically only apply to the font file itself (which is a computer program), and not to the shape of the typeface, which may be subject to a design patent.
[19] SWFTE was using special computer programs to take other type founders' fonts, convert them, and give them new names.
[19] Adobe Systems, Inc. v. Southern Software, Inc. helped clear the distinction between intellectual property protection for a font and a typeface.
It is also claiming substantial damages, from loss of revenue for that misuse and requesting a jury trial to resolve this matter.
[25] Most recently, Berthold LLC sued Target Corporation for its alleged breach of a font license agreement.