Typophile - New Letterhead Fonts antipiracy font lockdown scheme - Comments

Letterhead fonts are

patternmaker — Thu, 22 May 2008 13:46:36 -0700

Letterhead fonts are embeddable as of May 21st, though you need to re-download previously purchased fonts to have the embedding bit changed. The announcement is at http://letterheadfonts.com/news/index.shtml?a=blog&id=35.

apologies for not reading

lorem ipsum factor — Fri, 16 May 2008 06:21:39 -0700

apologies for not reading the whole of that above so this question may have been posed and answered already but:

does Illustrator let you ’create outline’ of these fonts?

edit : cmd+shift+p

AGL — Fri, 16 May 2008 06:09:54 -0700

edit : cmd+shift+p

I have heard it before in

AGL — Thu, 15 May 2008 08:00:20 -0700

I have heard it before in here. Actually this time was more painful as I was reading it was one thirty am. My lovely wife resolved to stick to this tv show and we ended up not going to bed at the customary time. Ah, I wasn’t watching the show as I was hammering a invitation project. It was at some point kind of difficult to proceed because my keyboard is black and the small type (actually it looks like Univers Italic and it measures ... exact 17 pt.! - I measured it with AGL type ruler, which is very accurate). So, as couldn’t read no more and gave up for the day I turned to this tread. I haven’t seen this tread until it was already skyrocketed to cosmic measurements. It was one am or so and once again I went to FH website and even thought of buying a font. I just can’t not love them cause nineteenth century is glued to my retinas. The prices aren’t bad but something bothers me, who have bought a couple of fonts ever due to that the use of fonts is part of the job and when the fonts are available with the packaged files, one can tweak here and there and get the job to rip and bye bye. All is fast in the commercial printing which couldn’t be without the font files. Of course doing the ctrl+o before pd-éfing the document, which is easy to do for display fonts as per Miss Tiffany. All measured out and all I guess you can even add dongles to the process which will indeed lock it all out, good, promoting your peace of mind.
I wish you exercise you determination as you see fit. Hail.

The thing with Quark is this.

Zan, welcome to typophile.

sii — Wed, 14 May 2008 11:53:54 -0700

Zan, welcome to typophile.

When did you get out of the plumbing business?

I bought a Letterhead font

zanseattle — Wed, 14 May 2008 09:31:44 -0700

I bought a Letterhead font last night and did not know about the brouhaha over restrictions, and quickly wrote to them for support. It was only then that I started Googling and found all the discussions about their DRM move.

This morning, I got a reply from Letterhead letting me know that they are removing the PDF-embedding restriction from ALL of their typefaces (it will be done in “2-3 days”) and to log in on the site and redownload the font I purchased. I think this is a very good move.

And another question...

zebrasystem — Thu, 3 Apr 2008 21:45:53 -0700

And another question... Couldn’t someone with FontLab simply open an LHF font and regenerate it so as to strip off the encrypted or embedded user info? If so, I’m kind of wondering what’s the point. The “smart” pirates are going to be smart enough to do so, meaning only the dumb ones get caught. But the end result is the knowledgeable pirates still pirate the fonts and get them circulated around without much trouble or being traced. No?

Going in a different

zebrasystem — Thu, 3 Apr 2008 21:40:18 -0700

Going in a different direction here from the previous comments. Just out of curiosity, and maybe this is a naive question, but I’m wondering... How does LHF’s new scheme of embedding a purchaser’s font file with their account number and other identifying info work so as not to cause functional problems with the operation of the font?

It’s bad marketing.

James Arboghast — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:41:29 -0700

It’s bad marketing. Macy’s doesn’t tell you they are increasing prices because of shoplifting and in-house theft, but they are.

Some things are left unspoken.

j a m e s

Macy’s doesn’t tell you

James Puckett — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 21:20:18 -0700

Macy’s doesn’t tell you they are increasing prices because of shoplifting and in-house theft, but they are.

Are you kidding me? I see signs in stores all the time stating that they have security cameras everywhere so that prices don’t keep going up!

It’s bad marketing.

Paul Cutler — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 20:44:43 -0700

It’s bad marketing. Macy’s doesn’t tell you they are increasing prices because of shoplifting and in-house theft, but they are.

pbc

Clearly the solution is to

aluminum — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 12:37:57 -0700

Clearly the solution is to get the IRS to allow theoretical losses due to piracy as a tax write off.

You can go on and on all you

James Arboghast — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 11:13:59 -0700

You can go on and on all you like about whether a pirated font equals a lost sale or not. That argument is circular, and it is hard to see the point of it, if there is any point to it at all. The answer is immaterial as we are talking about hypothetical sales.

Stephen Coles: Letterhead has responded to this criticism, but I don’t think the post really answers the key question: how do price increases reduce piracy?

Where does this idea come from? The idea that LHF’s price increases are supposed to reduce piracy of their fonts?

I’ve read most of this thread, and I have read what Chuck has written in response. The purpose of the price increases, as far as I can discern, is to compensate LHF for the lost production time incurred in cleaning up the mess pirates make in stealing LHF font products. I also presume the price increases are not intended to reduce piracy of LHF fonts.

I referred to “cleaning up the mess” in my first post on this thread. The point is, every time LHF’s fonts are pirated, some of the type producer’s time must be spent removing the pirated material from circulation. Fonts are labour-intensive things to make. The “lost revenue” compensated for by the LHF retail font price increases is, I presume, the revenue not earned due to their reduced capacity to make fonts caused by having to take illicit material out of circulation.

There is a basic problem with this discussion thread. It started on the topic of the anti-piracy lockdown scheme, then the topic of LHF font price increases cropped up, and somewhere along the way some commentators who should know better have confused the notion of “anti-piracy” with the price increases.

j a m e s

>>I think some foundries

Ralf Herrmann — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 05:53:41 -0700

>>I think some foundries think fonts being pirated EQUALS a lost sale.

Not only foundries, every software company likes to do those statistics of losses due to piracy. (Number of illegal copies/downloads x Price = Loss)
Of course, that is nonsense. The ones who are collecting gigabytes of fonts in P2P networks are usually teenagers who would never had bought the fonts. So there is no loss.
But there is also a number of professional designers who try to find a font for free, and only if they are not successful they will buy it. So here the download can be a real financial loss for the foundry. So the real question is: Is the time spent hunting down these people less expensive than the loss they create. I guess not.
I would even image that many fonts (or other software products), that are used without a license today, can turn into a real sale tomorrow. I didn’t bought my first version of Photoshop, but I did when I started a company. The same could be true for fonts.
Another example: Some years ago I did this type specimen book with recommendable fonts from various foundries. The majority of foundries was willing to give me their fonts to be presented in the book. But some foundries didn’t, and I’m sure they didn’t gave it me because they were afraid I could spread the fonts for free. But in the end, those were the fonts I couln’t advertise …
Font piracy was invented the day after the first letter was casted. It was always there and it will never go away. I guess if you are overcautious with your fonts, you are the one decreasing the sales …

You’re on to something,

Stephen Coles — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 20:14:58 -0700

You’re on to something, James. Piracy is in many ways a symptom of undereducated design students. Young people don’t react to scolding or price increases. A patient, thorough education in letter drawing will help them value type. Of course, that education isn’t the responsibility of the type makers, but it is helpful for everyone to understand the roots of the problem.

New Letterhead Fonts antipiracy font lockdown scheme

zebrasystem — Mon, 8 Jan 2007 17:52:26 -0800

Has anyone else dealt yet with the new LetterheadFonts.com method for installing/using fonts? I recently bought one of their new fonts since they converted their entire library over to OpenType in late December. And aside from the very nice font I must say I am quite dismayed. Here is what they’ve done:

1. You no longer receive an actual font file, at least not that you can see.

2. Instead what you download is an installer that installs an application called “Letterhead Fonts” (at least on Macintosh which is what I use).

3. The fonts are either embedded in this “Letterhead Fonts” application or somewhere else unknown/hidden from the user. No fonts are installed in the traditional Font folder locations.

4. Once installed, the “Letterhead Fonts” application activates the fonts permanently, at least as far as I can tell, like a font manager. You see them only in the font menus of your other applications, nowhere else. It also doesn’t currently allow fonts to be seen or managed in font manager applications like Suitcase, Font Agent, etc., though LHF apparently plans to add this capability.

Aside from the obvious antipiracy objective, here are the biggest ramifications and problems I see for the user (myself, for one):

- You are completely prohibited from organizing the fonts like you want on your hard drive, such as for classification or other purposes. All your flexibility is taken away including any system or method that you might have had in place to manage fonts for your own needs.

- As mentioned, the LHF fonts can’t be activated individually. It’s an all or nothing proposition. (Unless/until they enable font managers to “see” the fonts perhaps, but maybe not even then, I haven’t seen them say.)

- It means you can’t add kerning pairs to a font, for example, or otherwise tweak the font yourself if problems are found or you have special needs.

- And of course, you can’t really back up the fonts themselves. Your only recourse if something were to happen is a reinstall from the various installers you may have accumulated over time, or else go back to their site for the installers there. (They do make provision for downloading previous font orders you have made with their new shopping cart system.)

A real shame since this will probably make a lot of people think twice about buying additional fonts once they see how it works the first time. I know it has me, despite LHF’s unique fonts. Lots of other good independent foundries around these days as alternatives. What do the rest of you think about where LHF has gone with this?