On Tuesday 23 October 2001 21:57, Sergej Malinovski wrote: > I was reading the free FontLab Manual the other day and it says that > you can patent fonts.
The verb "to patent" is a bit misleading here, because the underlying legislation is not the "patent law", but the "designs law" of the respective countries. You have to distinguish between - copyright - registered trade mark - registered design - patent which are different legal instruments with different rules and application processes, though the last three are typically administered by people working for the respective national patent office. http://www.patent.gov.uk/ http://www.patent.gov.uk/design/definition.htm What is a Design? A registered design is a monopoly right for the outward appearance of an article or a set of articles of manufacture. It can last for a maximum of 25 years and is a property that, like any other business commodity, may be bought, sold, hired or licensed. A registered design is additional to any design right or copyright protection that may exist automatically in the design. The application process is different, but the protection granted for a design by registration can be similar to that granted for an invention in a patent. Designs usually refer to type faces, not fonts, which is a more abstract notion of the artistic work that went into the shape of the glyph, and not just the technical details of the font format and hinting information. The corresponding German legal term is "Geschmacksmuster", and more information on this legal protection form is available on http://www.dpma.de/formulare/gsm.html http://www.dpma.de/formulare/r5704.1.pdf As the last URL says, type faces (fonts) can be protected for up to 25 years in Germany as registered designs. The above URL also list some relevant international treaties, such as the Vienna Agreement of 1975-06-12 for the Protection of Type Faces and their International Deposit. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> _______________________________________________ Fonts mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/fonts
