TYPE AS A SPECIFIC COPYRIGHT OBJECT - Наукові конференції
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Рік заснування видання - 2014

TYPE AS A SPECIFIC COPYRIGHT OBJECT

24.06.2019 22:04

[Секція 8. Інтелектуальна власність та його захист. Інформаційне право]

Автор: Arkhipova Kateryna, student of The Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University 5th year of study. 2nd group


Modern Internet is practically formed as a powerful information space. With each decade in our life something new and unknown appears for previous generations – movies, television, comics, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat. Paradoxically, in the same decades the type as a standardized embodiment of writing not only does not lose its meaning, but becomes more and more important and irreplaceable. Having begun to absorb handwriting with the advent of typewriters and finally doing away with this remnant in the era of personal computers, in the last decade, thanks to the popularity of instant messengers and social networks, the triumphal attack on the realm of oral communication began.Writing machine text is impossible without using types. But have you ever thought about whether the use of the typeface/font could infringe copyright? How can we protect ourselves from legal problems with types? What is the nature of the types in different countries of the world?

The nature of legal protection of types in different countries of the world remains different. On June 12, 1973 the Vienna Agreement for the Protection of Type Faces and their International Deposit was opened for signature in Vienna. It obliged the participating countries to either introduce special typefaces registration systems or ensure the protection of typefaces by national copyright law. However, the Vienna Convention will enter into force after ratification by at least five countries, while at the moment it has been signed by 11 states, and only France (in 1976) and Germany (in 1981) have ratified it. Therefore, in order to learn the system of legal protection of types, we need to consider a single country and a single system. 

There are three approaches to protecting typefaces as objects of copyright in world practice:

1. Typefaces and topographical ornaments are not protected as copyright objects – the United States.

2. The legal protection of typefaces is determined by the categories of «typographical arrangements of published editions» – England, Australia, New Zealand. At the same time, the term of such protection is not the same term for the protection of property rights for other works and usually is 25 years, which is deducted from the end of the calendar year in which the appropriate font was used for the first time.

3. Legal protection of typefaces with the help of copyright is possible through the category of «works – graphics» – Ukraine, «graphic and printing works» (fr. Les oeuvres graphiques et typographiques) – France. At the same time, the period of protection of property rights is valid throughout the life of the author and 70 years after his death (in common law). 

To determine the typeface as a graphic work – an object of copyright in Ukraine, it is necessary to have conditions for its defense, which is the creative nature and the objective form of expression.

Now let us move on to the issue of legal protection of fonts. There are 2 kinds of fonts:

• Bitmapped fonts, in which each symbol is described as a set of points (pixels) located in nodes of the raster grid and represent an image. Such a computer font is a digital form of expression of a typeface. 

• Scalable fonts, in which character mapping is described using mathematical formulas in a particular programming language. In determining the legal protection of scalable fonts, it is expedient to attribute them to computer programs. This approach applies in particular in Germany (LG Köln, 12.01.2000 - 28 O 133/97), the United States (Adobe Sys. v. Southern Software, Inc., 1998 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 1941).

It should be noted that copyright is applied directly to the form of the expression of a work, which in the case of scalable fonts is a computer program, and not an external expression of the display of the font. Therefore, the achievement of the same result of displaying a font with using a different programming language cannot be recognized as a violation of the copyright of the font.

The most famous font is Times New Roman. It was created in 1932 for the newspaper The Times. Now the full Times New Roman package costs just over $ 500. And it is absent  in some computer systems, for example, in Linux.

Under current conditions, the specificity of the legal protection of typefaces by copyright is in their dualistic nature: on the one hand, typefaces are independent objects of copyright and they are protected as graphic works (bitmapped fonts are a digital form of expression of fonts, and hence are graphical ones works); on the other hand, scalable fonts are subject to legal protection as computer programs. Having analyzed some aspects of the use of fonts in the modern world, their legal protection, we can say that the world community, with some exceptions, recognizes font as an object of copyright. This is due to the fact that in the Internet era copying and illegal use of fonts became easier, cheaper and safer (due to anonymity). All this requires the establishment in the law of mechanisms to protect the rights of font creators, as well as fixing these mechanisms in judicial practice.



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