On Thu, 2003-11-20 at 16:36, Osamu Aoki wrote: > HITACHI font is bitmap fonts. Since it is 32 dots fonts which can hold > some aestetic feature of characters, it has uniq shape as a set of > characters. If starts recognizing copyright on bitmap fonts, then we'll have to start removing a fair deal of fonts from Debian. In the United States, fonts can't be copyrighted. Only "font programs" (e.g., the PostScript code used to produce the glyph) can be. So there can be no copyright on bitmap fonts, and using a bitmap font, a printout, or even tracing over an image on screen is perfectly legal. We have previously made decisions relying on Feist v. Rural Telephone, which certainly only applies in the US. Which nations copyright laws should Debian follow? I'd hate if the answer became "the worst case". Currently we seem to have a US-bias; I'd also hate it if our foreign mirrors had to drop Debian. Here's hoping against ever having to create another non-Whatever segment again...
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