[OpenFontLibrary] Hevetice Neue on the OpenFont site

[Liam R E Quin]

On Wed, 2009-06-24 at 00:02 +0100, Dave Crossland wrote:
[...]
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typeface#Legal_aspects :
> 
> "Many western countries 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."

and we learn again not to trust wikipedia on copyrights, maybe?
I'd be very interested to know if this is true... would it mean that
a typeface made in the US would in Germany be treated as if it had,
say, life + 90 years of protection?  Or that any book produced outside
the US has, in the US, no protection if it was published before 1923?

It's explicitly not true for photographs in the UK that were also
published in EC Member countries; there, the longest possible
copyright period is used...

Hmm, that word "obligated" - under the treaty it doesn't have to (is
the claim being made) but the US could choose to... so it's down to
case law, if that's true.

None the less, if you live in a country where there is the copyright
for type designs that type designers have wanted in other countries :-),
you still need to exercise care.  And it seems to me better not to
copy an existing design in any case!  But if necessary, choose one
that would be out of copyright both where it was made and where you
live.  At one time the GPL wasn't legally enforceable in the UK,
but that didn't make it very nice behaviour to violate it.

Liam


-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org