Hello Legal,
I'm bringing back a discussion from 2012[1]: Figlet fonts!
Indeed, I am trying to package python-pyfiglet[2] as a dependency for other
packages. But, after the review, it came up that a lot of weird fonts were
included. At the time, I didn't know anything about the discussion, and
decided
to abort everything.
Recently though, a developer contacted me through the bug report, and
proposed
to help on the issue. He triaged the fonts and separated them depending on
whether they were Open-Source or not, and we were thus able to create a
clean
package with none of the problematic fonts in it.
In that discussion[3], emerged the fact that a discussion over this already
happened ([1]), but it seems that either no consensus was reached, or
that such
consensus was lost to time as I wasn't able to find any conversation on
figlet
either on legal or devel mailing lists archives. And, it seems that the
issue
was just simply avoided since figlet ended up removing the problematic fonts
anyway.
But, upstream would like to keep the problematic fonts if possible in
Fedora.
And so, I would like to ask Legal to either give me the answer, if it
actually
was a settled matter, or to reach a consensus on Figlet fonts.
To resume the situation (as I understand it, I am not a lawyer, obviously):
In the US, fonts glyphs are not copyright-able as it is considered
insufficiently creative. For the same reason, Bitmap fonts (fonts
defined pixel
by pixel) are also not copyright-able, as they are only considered as
data which
represents glyphs. But, Vector fonts (fonts defined using drawing
instructions
and code), is, on the other hand, copyright-able because it is defined
through a
software code.
Then, we come to Figlet fonts. For those not aware of what Figlet fonts,
they
are also known as ASCII fonts:
__ __ ____ __ ____
/ / / /__ / / /___ / / ___ ____ _____ _/ / /
/ /_/ / _ \/ / / __ \ / / / _ \/ __ `/ __ `/ / /
/ __ / __/ / / /_/ / / /___/ __/ /_/ / /_/ / /_/
/_/ /_/\___/_/_/\____( ) /_____/\___/\__, /\__,_/_(_)
|/ /____/
The issue with those is that no ruling (as far as I know) ever concerned
that
type of font in US Court. Though, one argument would be that Figlet
fonts are
similar to Bitmap fonts, as they only contain data about glyphs, and do
not, in
the same way as Vector fonts do, contain code giving to the computer drawing
instructions for the fonts. As such Figlet fonts are not modular, or
extensible,
they just contain raw data about a font.
But still, all this is speculation, and, as I said, I am not a lawyer, so I
don't have any slight idea if such a defense would hold in court.
I hope to have resumed the situation clearly enough and that I didn't
make any
mistake.
Greetings,
Lyes Saadi
[1]: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=820642
[2]: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1876108
[3]: https://github.com/pwaller/pyfiglet/issues/89
PS: Can we remove the FE-legal blocker from the review request now that
all the
fonts have been sorted out?
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