Legal Restrictions On Type Designs
The following is personal opinion and certainly not legal advice, and is a repost of mine from a typophile discussion :-)
USA: “Patents for designs shall be granted for the term of 14 years from the date of grant.” and the first ever design patent was for a typeface. I’ve not yet found out how much it costs.
EU: “Community Designs” are either unregistered, which means automatic (like copyright) and those last 3 years (although they only started on 12th December 2001) or they are registered (like patents) which “confers on the design great certainty should infringement occur” and last 5 years from the filing date but can be renewed in blocks of five years up to a maximum of 25 years. The cost is variable because registrations can be done in batches but a single design for immediate publication appears to cost €350 - there is a cost calculator webpage to play with.
UK: the copyright law has a section specifically for typefaces that gives them a 25 year copyright term, and that is the same length as for “typographical arrangements” (book/magazine/etc layouts). And this is the same length of the maximum term for UK “registered designs” which, like EU RCD, last 5 years and can be renewed 5 times - though it seems redundant. Registrations cost £60 but may be done in batches where the rest cost £40. You can reduce this to £40/£20 if you wait a year between registering the design and publishing it.
If these laws are protections or restrictions is matter of perspective, and I consider ‘restrictions’ to be the correct term for me. I welcome suggestions for neutral terms :-)
The reason the lettershapes are restricted differently to the words we write are because they are fundementally different things. The terms of copyright vary according to different kinds of things, and many things are not subject to copyright. Usually that is because they are functional; the USA sees letter shapes as purely functional - we use them to read. Art, like a painting or a text, isn’t used to do something. In the UK, we do recognise them as somewhat artistic and thus subject to copyright, but only for 25 years.
And yes, this is talking about purely shapes, which may be expressed in ink brushed on to paper, engraved in metal, shaped in potato, as dots of ink lazered on to paper. All of those expressions are considered as the type design directly. However, when a program describes the shapes, that program is copyright, like any other program. That we create our PostScript programs with GUIs for our convenience, may fool us into thinking that they are not programs, but they are programs which output dots of ink on paper or dots of light on screens.
I should call the UK IPO Enquiries staff on 0845 9 500 505 (Note, all calls are recorded but ‘treated in the strictest confidence’) and also request the booklet ‘Applying for a Registered Community Design’ because these design rights are only scoped for the UK, and a Registered Community Design gives power across the EU.
The Legal Restrictions On Type Designs by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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