points by gilfaethwy 2 days ago | 0 comments
I've been doing some bookbinding projects recently, e.g. some of William Morris's works originally published by his Kelmscott Press, and have been typesetting them using some replica fonts. This is a very cool project.
I do wish they'd provide more details about where a given font comes from. For instance, CL Antique No.1's uppercase bears a strong resemblance to Morris's drop caps used in News From Nowhere, but there doesn't seem to be a reference to what CL Antique No.1 is based on.
Or maybe I'm just missing that somewhere?
[–] card_zero 2 days ago
[–] prewett 1 day ago
I expect that copyright protection on these would be pretty thin. Copyright doesn't exist on mechanically generated lists (e.g. the phone book) since they do not involve any creativity. Since the page explicitly says that that the fonts include the "charming" warts and all, and they only include the glyphs originally printed, one could make a good argument that their intent was mechanical translation to a digital format rather than a creative process. If you could demonstrate that the glyphs were essentially scanned in, for instance, that would bolster the argument.
[–] kmoser 2 days ago
> Will you win if you try?
Pretty sure that depends on the court, and isn't something you can determine in advance.
* Will you actually sue anybody who doesn't follow your very fussy rules about what they can't do with the public domain works that you've scanned?
* Will you win if you try?
* Do you deliberately hide the original sources and names in case people go straight to the source instead of paying you?
* What happens to the rare books after you scan them?