Re: Are licences needed for rendered bitmaps?

[David Marshall]

Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
> I remember from somewhere that shapes of the fonts are not copyrightable
> in United States. Only the program that renders them, and things like TTF
> and PS Type1 are considered programs in this case. Because it's nothing
> more than an "A" for example, and it's really bad to copyright an "A".

Note that quite a few other countries provide the save level of
protection to typeface designs as they would to any other kind of
graphic design. America is highly anomalous (and unjustifiably
inconsistent) when it comes to protection of typeface designs.

The answer to the original question is that it's probably OK. The
question is whether the program uses the bitmaps to simply present
information to the user (fair usage) or allows the user to do something
creative with the bitmaps (probably copyright infringement).

HTH
Dave
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