Hello Legal,
I just bring this up again because the pyfiglet contributors and myself
are still waiting for an answer.
Should I maybe ask this question somewhere else? Or can we have an
update if anything has been done?
Also, can the FE-legal blocker be removed from the review request now
that all the fonts that remain are under an Open-Source license anyway?
Greetings,
Lyes Saadi
Le 23/10/2021 à 21:30, Lyes Saadi a écrit :
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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