The MPAA’s much-publicized anti-piracy campaign of the 2000s, launched by the Motion Picture Association of America and carried out under the slogan “You wouldn’t steal a car, would you? So you shouldn’t pirate a movie either,” turned out to be itself a copyright infringement. According to Ars Technica, the MPAA materials allegedly used an unlicensed font, namely a copy of the original FF Confidential font.
FF Confidential font. Image source: fontsinuse.com
The commercials, which ran before the films were shown in theaters and on DVD from 2004 to 2008, scared viewers about the consequences of piracy. One of the commercials showed a girl downloading a film, after which a graffiti-style caption appeared on the screen: “You wouldn’t steal a car.” However, the font used in the caption was identified as FF Confidential, created by renowned designer Just van Rossum in 1992, according to the website Fonts in Use.
Reporter Melissa Lewis of the Center for Investigative Journalism noted that enthusiasts had previously discovered a very similar font called XBand Rough. Lewis contacted Rossum, who confirmed that XBand Rough was a clone of his design.
XBand Rough font. Image source: arstechnica.com
Later, a user named Rib checked the PDF file from the campaign’s archive site and, using FontForge, found that the document did indeed use XBand Rough. At the same time, van Rossum, in an interview with the popular publication TorrentFreak, which covers trends in the BitTorrent protocol, said that he knew about the clone, but did not suspect that the MPAA used it in its campaign. “It’s funny,” he commented, but declined to provide further clarification.
It’s unclear how widely XBand Rough was used in the MPAA materials. It’s possible it was used only in specific documents, not the main commercial. However, this is difficult to verify, as the campaign’s source files are not available. The legal intricacies of the case are also complicated by differences in copyright law. In the US, typeface designs are not protected as such, but font files can be, as they are considered software code.
In the UK, where anti-piracy trailers were also broadcast, the copyright issue is more complex, although copyright law generally protects fonts for 25 years after first publication. In Germany, where the original publisher FontFont was headquartered, fonts are protected for the first 10 years, and then for another 15 years if the copyright holder pays a fee.
«”Most fonts are very similar to each other, so proving their uniqueness is difficult,” explained US intellectual property attorney James Aquilina. FF Confidential was originally released by FontFont, which was acquired by Monotype in 2014. The font is now sold with a USPTO registration mark.
Aquilina noted that the use of pirated fonts in commercial projects is not uncommon in general. “It happens because of the popularity of certain fonts and the desire to achieve a certain style,” he said. However, lawsuits over this issue are rare, and copyright holders often go after distributors rather than end users.
At the same time, the origin of XBand Rough, a clone of FF Confidential, remains a mystery. The name of the font refers to the XBAND gaming platform (1994-1997), so it is assumed that the font appeared around 1996. One of the users Bluesky even put forward a version that XBAND could have legally licensed FF Confidential, and then renamed it. And then XBand Rough just accidentally “leaked” onto the Internet.
The MPA (formerly the MPAA) declined to comment on the situation, but as experts noted, intellectual property laws are far more complex than comparing “film theft to car theft.”