austanss wrote:
Octocontrabass wrote:
In the United States, bitmap fonts (such as PSF files) are not copyrightable.
Good to know.
To clarify this..
Fonts in the US follow similar copyright rules to cookbooks: The things they describe are not copyrightable, but the presentation may be. Typefaces - the design of the glyphs in a font - are specifically not copyrightable under 37 C.F.R. ยง 202.1(e). But, a font
file may be subject to copyright if it involves creative representation or artistry: That includes
being a "program". This means TrueType/OpenType fonts and even just vector descriptions in general are still considered copyrightable, even if the glyph shapes they are describing are not. Bitmap font files, though, don't meet the same conditions.
Japan is similar, the courts here having decided that typefaces are meant to convey information - not artistic expression. However, many countries
do extend copyright protection to typefaces. Germany, the UK, Ireland, Israel...
All that said, there's plenty of typefaces and corresponding fonts available under the SIL Open Font License, which has some unique requirements (eg. you can't sell a SIL licensed font alone, though you can sell it in a bundle, so including a SIL licensed font in a commercial product is totally fine) but is otherwise approved of by all the FOSS orgs.
For my bitmap font needs, I baked a bitmap version of Deja Vu (which has
its own license that is basically the same as a BSD license but with some requirements for not distributing modified versions under the names of its originating sources), which then matches up nicely with the original TrueType version I use in userspace.