🚀 go-pugleaf

The only questionable thing I see in this font protection
that Adobe just won is that there is an extremely limited
number of ways to describes the generic shapes in PostScript.
If one wants to produce a cubic spline, then one has to
say <numbers> curveto, and to get the right shape, there is one
particular set of <numbers>. It is certainly contrary to
previous copyright law to say that if something can be 
produced in only one way, or in a small number of ways, that
that thing can be copyrighted.

So, what is protected must be of larger granularity. In
order for Adobe to sue someone making a font, they
would have to show that the organization of the program/font
was the same, that the same hints were used in the same way,
and the same basic shapes were being output in the same way.
This seems reasonable. Speaking as someone who might be
producing freely distributable PostScript fonts, I would
certainly never (a) look at their font programs, and so (b) the
odds of my producing the same program to produce the shape,
even given that we are using the same language, is about nil.
If it's NOT nil, then it's because there is only one way
to do it, and so Adobe cannot sue me.

In other words, it appears to me that the only thing
that is protected is Adobe's actual code; i.e., people
cannot legally take THEIR code and sell it or produce
fonts with it or whatever. But if someone produces their
own code, that is still perfectly fine.

At least, I hope that is the case. If not, it is a nightmare.

karl@cs.umb.edu