
Goldman Sachs Created a Font, but You're Forbidden by Its License to Critique GS - Tomte
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200625/11063644781/goldman-sachs-created-font-you-are-forbidden-license-to-critique-goldman-sachs-using-it.shtml
======
ezoe
This license doesn't work in Japan for the result of font rendering is not
protected by the copyright.

It was decided in the court that in order the shape to be recognized as a
character, that shape must follow the pattern we generally agree upon. The
copyright is granted for the expression that reflect the human thought, if the
shape can be recognized as a character, there is limited human thought left.

I think that's a fair argument.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
Font copyrights are connected to the embedded hinting program.

~~~
colejohnson66
My knowledge in font copyrights is limited, but what if one just removed the
embedded hinting programs? Sure, it’d look bad, but would that fix the
copyright issue?

~~~
jcrawfordor
More or less - this kind of thing does happen, but not by as technical means
as extracting the hinting from the font (because you would need to provide new
hinting anyway for it to look any good, and you get into a complex knowledge
firewall situation doing that).

Instead, it's common for font foundries to design a new font based on the
result of an existing one, creating an effective duplicate font divorced of
copyright claim. It's pretty common for a few differences to be inserted
though, I think less out of concern over copyright and more so that it's
possible to determine which font was used for license enforcement of the new
one.

This prominently happened with Arial, which is a copy of Helvetica designed by
Monotype so that they could stop paying fees to license Helvetica from
Linotype as part of their font offerings for early raster printers (back when
fonts were embedded in the print engine). There are numerous other examples,
to the extent that if one foundry offers a font which is particularly popular,
the other major foundries probably also offer their own "version" of it.

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FabHK
Did GS pull the page touting their font? Or is my browser acting up?

[https://design.gs.com/d/story/goldman-
sans/](https://design.gs.com/d/story/goldman-sans/)

~~~
tsomctl
> Requests to the server have been blocked by an extension.

This is after disabling all of my extensions, including uBlock Origin.

~~~
Baeocystin
I've come across a couple of instances of this over the past couple of weeks.
Not sure what to make of it.

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Cenk
> (C)(2)(d) The User may not use the Licensed Font Software to disparage or
> suggest any affiliation with or endorsement by Goldman Sachs.

> (E)(2) Further, Goldman Sachs may terminate this License, without notice to
> the User, for any reason or no reason at all and at any time, completely at
> Goldman Sachs’s sole discretion.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
> The User may not use the Licensed Font Software to disparage or suggest any
> affiliation with or endorsement by Goldman Sachs.

I would like to make clear that although I may disparage Goldman Sachs this
does not mean I disparage any affiliation with them.

~~~
moonchild
I think it's fairly clear that it's

> disparage or (suggest any ((affiliation with) or (endorsement by))) Goldman
> Sachs

Not

> (disparage or suggest) any ((affiliation with) or (endorsement by)) Goldman
> Sachs

And GS has more lawyers than you.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
>And GS has more lawyers than you.

yet they're still not able to write a contract punctuated so as to avoid
ambiguous wording.

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SanchoPanda
The difficult to distinguish 0's and O's are still the worst part of this.
It's supposed to be for numbers focused things, come on.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> It's supposed to be for numbers focused things, come on.

It's not supposed to be for programming. If the 0 and O glyphs were identical,
where would that confuse a reader, in a numbers-focused document?

~~~
elliekelly
Contracts. I’ve run into the issue trying to reference paragraph 2O vs
paragraph 20. (Paragraph 2 is often definitions and tends to get lengthy.)

~~~
thaumasiotes
That's a good example. It makes me curious about such nested references,
though -- in my mind, they usually look something like 2.III.O, or 2(III)(O),
or the like.

~~~
elliekelly
That’s definitely how they would usually be referenced but when it’s crunch
time and you’re firing emails back and forth trying to hammer out the details
that tends to fall by the wayside. Especially on mobile. And 99% of the time
it’s clear enough. 2(B) or 2B doesn’t leave much room for confusion but oh man
did those missing parens on the O cause us a lot of confusion about version
control.

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fifticon
Apart from its strange provenance, I thought it is a beautiful typeface.
Something ugly gave birth to something beautiful.

~~~
loktarogar
and then wrapped it in an ugly license blanket

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rangibaby
How to get people to use your typeface to disparage your company 101

See also: Striesand Effect

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awinter-py
philosophically interesting concept -- a typeface that cannot express certain
concepts

GS being boring and doing it w browsewrap, but I wonder if you could go
farther and use ligature rules to warp certain words

~~~
jswrenn
It's been done!

Scunthorpe Sans censors out profanity: [https://vole.wtf/scunthorpe-
sans/](https://vole.wtf/scunthorpe-sans/)

Seen censors "spook" words: [http://projectseen.com/](http://projectseen.com/)

~~~
pvaldes
> Scunthorpe Sans censors out profanity

Failed at the first attempt. You'll need more than that to stop a mischievous
primate

~~~
sukilot
Read the page before advertising your ignorance of it.

~~~
pvaldes
Well. The idea is a simple one, No exactly rocket science. I assume that
anybody can grasp it even if just don't care about studying the metrics and
full specifications manual book.

My bet is that will not work as expected and will be easily abused by humans.
Based in my experience tricking the scunthorpe font in the first attempt

What really would work would be stopping overreacting about put-your-fave-
letter-here words and make it boring again. The more outrage they cause, the
most tempted will be people to use for fun and profit. I understand in any
case that some cultures are more direct than other when communicate.

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dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23616255](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23616255)

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mlacks
Does anyone else notice this thread’s font sizes are different per post,
seemingly at random?

~~~
mlacks
Sorry it’s a weird render that is only happening in landscape on iOS (XR)
Safari

~~~
colejohnson66
This is a known issue with iOS[0]. Basically, to keep you from having to zoom
in when mobile browsing first took off, Mobile Safari would make the text
bigger.

[0]: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3226001/some-font-
sizes-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3226001/some-font-sizes-
rendered-larger-on-safari-iphone)

