Dan posted this over at MyFonts and I directed him here for some education, anyone? Dan

Dan:

People in here don't like it when people ask for fonts instead of paying for them. (ie, you're asking for an illegal copy.)

Class dismissed.

Just a thought. While everyone here would love to set dannyboy on the correct path, I worry that this public post will encourage other font traders to contact him privately. Who knows who's lurking on these boards?

Although maybe I'm wrong. Because he had to register we've got his name... Joe, Jared? What do you think?

This is with all due respect to Daniel Weaver. I just want to make it clear I'm not pointing any fingers. Dannyboy could have surfed on in here by himself. I know you have the best interests at heart. Thank you for that. I'm sure Leslie would thank you too.

The propaganda benefits of publicly denouncing piracy far outweight the negative of unwittingly catering a single additional private act of piracy.

hhp

My point is he may not know its not right trading commercial fonts. It might be innocent ignorance, thus education rather than attacking. Convert the masses one at a time. Dan

Would it be helpful, to talk about the issue of font piracy from the "I" perspective, like it is customary in 12-step-programs?

So here it goes, Dan -

when I started out as a young designer, I wanted to get my hands on as many fonts as possible and it did not occur to me, that going against the policies of one of those font companies would actually hurt a human being. Later, when I designed my first font, I realized, how much work went into it and my perspective shifted. Today, I try to be accountable for all my actions in my daily life, so I arrived at a place, where giving something back seems simply the natural thing to do. I hope you're not just stunned by the reactions to your post, but get actually something out of it.

> I am no shining example and therefore am unable to educate anyone on this matter.

On the contrary, people like you (and me!) have the most to teach here.

hhp

Okay, here's the scenario running through my head. Dannyboy, or not necessarily him but anyone, posts a message not just on Typophile but say the MyFonts forums or AIGA or wherever. Even though we do our best to educate him (and I do believe in educating them, one at a time, too) say, hypothetically, he's not going to be converted. Then some lurker emails him privately:

Font Trading: A Play in One Act
by Dyana Weissman

Lurker: Hey, Stereotypical Font Pirate, I have Magneto. What do you have to trade?

Pirate: Well, I actually have the entire Font Bureau library, N-Z. Relay is peachy keen!

Lurker: What a coincidence! I have the entire Font Bureau library, A-M. Let's trade! Amplitude sure is dandy!

Pirate: Oh that's great! You know I have 30 friends who have been trying to get copies of Amplitude!

Lurker: I have 30 friends who have been trying to get their hands on Hoefler's entire library.

Pirate: Funny you should mention it, I have their entire library. Plus some fabulous gems by Peter Fahrni.

Lurker: Great. Gotham Condensed is so nice. I'll trade you all the P22's I have for 'em.

-End Scene-

I don't think there's ever a single act of piracy. Of course, my shamelessly plugged little scenario is catastrophizing, but this does happen all the time. I *still* have friends, who went to art school with me and know me personally and SHOULD KNOW BETTER! who *STILL* ask me to find them free fonts. Some people just don't care. My question is, when cases like this do arise, on Typophile or elsewhere, what should we do about them? Should we email the moderators with requests to have them removed (after, of course, patiently trying to educate)? Or is it a lost cause?

> I don't think there's ever a single act of piracy.

True. But these people are buyers anyway.

hhp

Hey I sure could use some P22 fonts! Anyone have any they want to trade? Let me know what you have...I promise I will respond.

Joseph, I mentioned this guy to Mike K at MyFonts, but I was wondering weither there is a rational approach to deal with this issue. People who drive still speed but there are signs telling what the limits are and what the penalities will be. Its part of driving. Why can't there be "signs" of Intellectual property theift that is simple as a stop sign. Maybe it's a ten commandments type of thing in the design schools. Dan
P.S. Richard you are funny

Ahh good. Thanks Jared & Joseph.

And Tiffany!

> I suppose this is as good as time as ever to mention that the board software logs the activity of the private messaging feature.

> For anyone considering contacting "Dan Nieger" (which, from an admin perspective, clearly isn't his real name) to pass or help pass pirated fonts, rest assured that we'll notice and you'll find yourself holding a swift one-way ticket off Typophile. Banned. Booted. Seeya.

I know you all don't know me well, so I want to note that I don't support piracy at all, and have stated this publicly at MyFonts. (I would provide a link to that, but the MyFonts.com forum server is down and has been for awhile today.) Anyway, I wanted to be clear that I wasn't responding to the piracy issue, and certainly not in the direction of being in favor of piracy. But I was curious (concerned?) about Jared's comment that "the board software logs the activity of the private messaging feature." What exactly does this mean? That people other than the recipient of the private message can read the message? That seems a little ... un-private, especially as that fact (assuming it is the fact) doesn't seem to be stated on the page where private messages are composed. Just wondering, as there are all sorts of legitimate (non-piracy-related) reasons why someone would want to send a private message and be assured it is not read by others (rather the point of sending a private message as opposed to posting on the board, yes?)

"That people other than the recipient of the private message can read the message? That seems a little ... un-private"

Twilight --

If you want privacy, write a note, drive it to your friends house, have them read it, then burn it. Thats really the closest thing you will have to privacy in this world.

Consider the fact that you send email, through an ISP I suppose. There has to be somone to administer that mail server, correct? Somone set it up, and keeps it running. That person has access to all your emails, sent or recieved. Not to say that that person has the right, or even the slightest desire to sift through all of your correspondence, but they do have the ability.
In short, things don't run themselves, they have to have some sort of human interaction, even if it is as little as 'turning them on'.

I don't think Jared was trying to imply he sifts through private messages, but in the circumstance that something 'shaky' surfaces, he is stating he does have this ability.

Make sense?

Okay, good, Kyle, your message helps me to clarify my thinking and writing about this, as your response makes me realize my message sounded much more naive and off-the-point than it should have. I certainly realize that private email isn't truly private, ever, but I don't think the ISP server administrator example is exactly on target here. I can't really picture an administrator at msn/aol/earthlink routinely checking people's email for objectionable content. And, as I understand it, it takes a court order for people outside the ISP to see that email (in other words, some amount of privacy is generally regarded as expected). (However, I do know that employers routinely scan the mail of employees, so there are wide variations in expectations of privacy.)

It seems, though, rather more that Jared is saying that private messages connected to controversial threads and/or to controversial posters is monitored and if the content of those private messages is unacceptable to the administrators, then the author of the private message is permanently kicked off the forum. (Though, that is really closer to your interpretation of what Jared said than anything Jared said.) I don't know ... the old lefty in me just finds that troubling, if true. My problem. But maybe a clarification is warranted.

Dan did the right thing by bringing Dannyboy here. What better place to learn about professional fontmakers' opinions on the damage piracy may or may not do to the industry?

At the same time, I don't think it's helpful to bully or threaten him. There are plenty of places to get pirated fonts, and this isn't one of them, and never will be.

For what it is worth ...

My involvement here at Typophile has convinced me to get rid of all the illegal fonts that I had aquired.

I used to grab 'em up on Usenet. I am sure you all know where ... Anyway, once I started to read and respond to people here that actually design and publish faces, I realized I was stealing. Also, I was able to put a human 'face' to who I was stealing from.

Well, I don't steal in any other facet of my life - why would I make an excuse to steal from type designers? So, I trashed the hundreds of faces I had on my HD.

So, my point being - exposure to this community did have a *very* positive on my thinking and actions with regard to aquiring and possesing type for private use.

Posting Dan's request here may not have been the right way to go about exposing him to the good people here. I am certain he could have been directed to a thread or two in the archives ...etc.

I am glad for this community and can say it has helped me see things in a better paradigm with regard to type creation and ownership.

Nuff Said.

Mike, thank you for your kind word. I'm still relatively new at this forum wouldn't know about those threads and how to find them. I guess I will get better at this with time. Dan

Dan Weaver -

I thought my experience was relevant to the topic, but I am not judging your suggestion to the Other Dan to post his request here. I think you were on the right track in trying to expose him to this community.

BTW - is your avatar an illustration of a fish riding a bicycle? That has been driving my nuts for weeks! ;)

Mike, you da man.

--

BTW, I'd written:
> But these people are buyers anyway.

I meant are not buyers.

hhp

Thanks, Hrant.

Mike, Dan, I've been trying to decipher the fish/bicycle picture too: the best I could make out was a fish operating a camera on a tripod. Bicycle makes more sense! ;)

Meredith --

for the longest time I though it was a fish vomiting something, maybe type?

Hildebrant.

hehe , I thought the fish was eating the camera.

Its a fish on a bicycle - a detail from an image on Dan's web site.
I know, because it bugged me enough to try to track it down. The thing that really made me need to find out was the bottom right corner. When I was trying to work the image out I caught sight of a face* in there and I just had to go and see if it was really a face.

The story behind my fish. Its from the saying "Like a fish needs a bicycle" well I'm an amateur bicycle racer, so I wanted a bike with my idenity. In the 80's a punk rock group called Blurt made a tune "The fish needs a bicycle" and at the time I made a painting of that idea. This is my 2003 version of it. The bicycle includes streamers from the handlebars, a basket and a rack with flowers on it. Dan

Mystery solved.

-- Encyclopedia Brown

in a song from Achtung Baby, U2's Bono sings, "A woman needs a
man, like a fish needs a bicycle."

A "U2/bicycle/fish" google search revealed this page.

http://www.bicyclingfish.com/bicyclingfish.htm

fwiw, I do not think that people asking for fonts elsewhere should
be directed here...
the reasons seem obvious, but I guess it's the same
perverse joy that causes people to rubberneck
at traffic accidents.

A pleasant email could do a lot more good, imo.

as far as the private messages,
I think Jared and Joe ought to change the wording,
"send a private message to x" ...

quite a few people who miss this thread will assume
that they have privacy, when they do not.

bj

BJ, the reason I sent dannyboy here wasn't about what I know, but to let him see the face behind the labor of creating intellectual property. Sandy Cohen, has an article this work about theivery and intellectual property at Creative Pro when its posted I will send a link. I'm not a type designer, I'm a designer of print and collateral who uses type.

"...you credit me with the witticism 'A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.' In fact, Irina Dunn, a distinguished Australian educator, journalist and politician, coined the phrase back in 1970 when she was a student at the University of Sydney." - Gloria Steinem to Time Magazine.

Irina Dunn has confirmed this story, in an e-mail of January 28, 2002: "Yes, indeed, I am the one Gloria referred to. I was paraphrasing from a phrase I read in a philosophical text I was reading for my Honours year in English Literature and Language in 1970. It was "A man needs God like a fish needs a bicycle".

www.epatric.com/articles/god-fish-bicycles.html

Please feel free to drop me a line any time you see anything dodgy in our forums. (BTW, Daniel, nobody here knows a "Mike K at MyFonts"!)

I've just posted this, our usual lines when we see irresponsible use of the forums. I also removed his email address.

----------

Danny Boy, please don't post requests for commercial fonts. This is not acceptable use of our forums.

As I am sure you understand, we can only operate these forums on the basis that they are not used for font piracy or font "sharing". Our participating foundries rightly would not accept that, and nor do we.

Thanks, and happy identifying!

-- Laurence Penney, MyFonts.com

Laurence, I think Daniel meant Mike F. (regular of the MyFonts forums). (Fora?)

Meredith, that is who I was refering to. He's mentioned Typophile before so I thought he was a regular here. Jared I don't mind the administrators looking over my shoulder, I choose to come here and play by the rules of the game. If I felt differently I just wouldn't come here.

I find it humorous that people are still posting messages to "danny boy", do you really think he stayed around for more than, well maybe, two messages condiming him?

Hildebrant.

Kyle, the last person who wanted a free ride was that guy Ian and he stayed for the last punch. Finally I asked that the dogs be called off, he got the point. I would guess maybe Danny Boy has either learned something or he ran away to lick his wounds. Who knows how old he is or how responsible he is for his actions. He might even read this, Dan

Gotta luv my spelling. ;)

-- and Dan, I do agree.

Condiming: putting your two cents in -- five times.

:-)

Or a very modest swindle.

hhp

Although. I wonder, aloud, he must know it isn't free for him to say "trade" and "dirty hands".

I suppose this is as good as time as ever to mention that the board software logs the activity of the private messaging feature.

For anyone considering contacting "Dan Nieger" (which, from an admin perspective, clearly isn't his real name) to pass or help pass pirated fonts, rest assured that we'll notice and you'll find yourself holding a swift one-way ticket off Typophile. Banned. Booted. Seeya.

Daniel (Weaver), perhaps in the future just nip this in the bud where it starts (MyFonts in this case).

To clarify:

Dan (dannyboy) did not provide an email address in his profile. Conceivably the only way to contact him and initiate a trade would be to use a private message. We just wanted to be very explicit that if others contacted him via the private message feature the forum software would record it.

We posted this at the risk of both scaring people away from the private message feature and sounding like the font police. These are the ugly consequences of people wanting to use our space to steal fonts.

It's neither our practice nor our penchant to read private messages. But we can if there's the threat of illegal behavior. (If we chose to look the other way we'd be aiding that behavior.)

The private message feature is really just a convenience and it should continue to be just that. If you have sensitive, personal or private matters, use email or a telephone. At least then you know only strangers have the potential to listen in and not Jared and Joe. =)

Rest assured, private messages are private. The board logs some essential data about the private messages which helps us safeguard against abuse but does not display the message being sent. But I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to