Today Melissa Lewis over on BlueSky pointed out that the font used in the infamous "You wouldn't steal a car" anti-piracy campaign was actually designed by Just van Rossum, whose brother, Guido, created the Python programming language (bsky.app/profile/melissa.news/post/3ln7hx5rhcj2v)
She also pointed out that the font had been cloned and released illegally for free under the name "XBAND Rough". Naturally, it would be hilarious if the anti-piracy campaign actually turned out to have used this pirated font, so I went sleuthing and quickly found a PDF from the campaign site with the font embedded (web.archive.org/web/20051223202935/http://www.piracyisacrime.com:80/press/pdfs/150605_8PP_brochure.pdf).
So I chucked it into FontForge and yep, turns out the campaign used a pirated font the entire time!
@RibRib
FWIW, technically speaking, you can’t really copyright a digital font in that way; to say it was ‘pirated’ isn’t really true. cloned? sure. fully legal? yeah, pretty much
the way font copyright works is that you can copyright the software but not the actual design of the type. in this case, “FF Confidential” is copyrighted as software. If I were to trace it, or make a very very close imitation of it, and then made a digital font out of it myself, it would, in all likelihood, be in the clear
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