The Internet fad of the moment (or was it yesterday's fad of the moment?) is flickr, a photo website and community which encourages creative commons licensing and image reuse. One of those reuses is Spell with flickr, a neat tool in which the text of your choice is spelt out in random letters taken from flickr.
This raises significant issues, however, because a large number of companies (and open source projects) are in the business of sell fonts, which they claim copyright over. If copyright does exist on fonts, does it still exist on the font once it has been used in signage, placed in a public place, photographed, and posted to flickr? What if the images were then taken and repackaged as a font? If not, does this provide a mechanism for users to duplicate copyrighted fonts in an uncopyrighted manner?
This has been discussed by readers on boingboing, where the conclusion appears to be that fonts are not copyrightable in the USA, but programs that implement them are.
To complicate matters, in Germany there is a special law protecting copyright of fonts. To quote the comp.fonts FAQ: In Germany, where typeface design has always been a significant part of the cultural heritage, and where typefounding has remained an important business, there are more than one kind of copyright-like protections for typefaces. Certain long-standing industrial design protection laws have been used to protect typeface designs in litigation over royalties and plagiarisms. Further, there is a recent law, the so-called "Schriftzeichengesetz" enacted in 1981, that specifically protects typeface designs. New designs are registered, as is done with copyright in most countries. This law only protects new, original designs. It is available to non-German designers and firms. Therefore, some type firms and designers routinely copyright new designs in West Germany. This gives a degree of protection for products marketed in Germany. Since multinational corporations may find it cheaper to license a design for world-wide use rather than deal with a special case in one country, the German law does encourage licensing on a broader scale than would initially seem to be the case.
