Re: Do we have trademark infringements by fonts?
On Tuesday 18 February 2003 04:28 am, Anton Zinoviev wrote:
> A friend of mine has pointed me that it is very likely that many fonts
> have problems with trademark infringement. I suppose that some
> (most?) of the font names are registered,
> I don't know what is the right legal choice,
IANAL, but what Corel did with Corel Draw, which included a whole lot of
"look alike" fonts was to give them alternate (but similar) names. They
probably claimed trademark on them. So, for example, "Lucida" becomes
"Lucid" or "Lucy" and so on. Designers using free software would just have
to get used to the new names (never bothered me with Corel Draw, and I'd be
fine with it in Debian). So, Debian could simply use new names and actually
claim tradmark status on them to prevent any kind of grab for the names (but
that's easy enough if you just call it "Debian Lucid" or something).
You could distribute a key somewhere which says that "Debian Loafer" is
derived from "Gold Brick" or some such thing. Since it doesn't represent the
alternative *as* the original, that's perfectly okay -- you're just claiming
the fonts are similar (and I think you can do the equivalent internally when
considering font substitution rules).
This is just my impression of what's been done before by companies who were
faced with this issue (I'm pretty sure I've seen other examples of this, but
I know Corel did it).
Cheers,
Terry
--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.anansispaceworks.com
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