There’s an infamous anti-piracy advertisement from back in 2004 that online oldsters will immediately recognize: “You wouldn’t steal a car,” it begins, complete with shakycam footage of some sketchy looking dude popping a lock, before rolling into various other types of theft and eventually equating it all with downloading a copy of Shrek 2. The ad makes it dramatically clear: Stealing Shrek will get you hard time in the slam when you’re inevitably busted for your criminal ways.
It was, and is, overwrought and silly, and so of course it inspired numerous parodies and memes: The British comedy series The IT Crowd did a particularly good one a few years after the original aired—in fact the old URL, piracyisacrime.com, now directs to The IT Crowd Clip on YouTube. I urge you to watch it. The ad itself was only around for a short time, but “you wouldn’t download a car” has endured in shitpost form for decades; it’s practically embedded in the fabric of the internet at this point.
But as good as many of these parodies are, none are as ridiculous (and funny) as the recent discovery that the world’s best-known anti-piracy ad may have used a pirated font.
The distinctive font used in the ad appears to be FF Confidential, created by Just van Rossum in 1992. But there’s another font called XBand Rough that’s virtually identical, and when journalist Melissa Lewis reached out to van Rossum about it, he told her XBand Rough is an “illegal clone” of FF Confidential.
This is where it gets interesting. After all this, another Bluesky user named Rib used the FontForge tool on a PDF file from the old anti-piracy campaign, available via the Wayback Machine, and discovered the file in question uses the XBand Rough font—the clone.
This ad probably made more people aware of how easy it is to pirate movies and introduced the idea of doing that than it ever deterred people from pirating. I see the advertisement in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZm8vNHBSU
If I could steal a car by downloading it over the internet without depriving the original owner of it and with similarly low risk of getting caught/prosecuted for it I would absolutely steal a car. I wouldn’t steal a font tho, that’s just beyond the pale. :P
My eighty year-old parents have “borrowed” my car for a year.
I, too, would download one if I could.
And so would they I suppose. It crosses generations!
I love our spiderman meme culture where everyone is pointing their fingers at each other accusing them of stealing their idea/song/art/etc.
I can never understand how people carry so much water for corporations who could care less about them. We are supposed to rearrange our entire society around their revenue streams.
yeah. it’s mind blowing to me how the Internet was convinced to give up its a culture of piracy and privateering and become sycophants for corporate protection of IP under they imaginary impression that they are “protecting artists”.
There were industry executives and think tanks litterally quoted (in the 2000s) for saying that their job was to effectively convince people that piracy “hurt the artist”, that this was the way to stop piracy: convince people they were hurting artists by piracy.
Turns out, almost no artists except the most extraordinarily successful make any money off copyright or IP. They mostly make their money the way they’ve always made their money: ticket sales, merch sales, performances, etc.
Yo, that is my sequence of 0’s and 1’s is how ridiculous it all is in the digital era. Not to mention I have to pay for and maintain the hardware to even access the content.
I also have a hard time understanding the self imposed artificial scarcity we live with. Copying work/art/ideas/science is literally the point of humanity. We are truly living in a perverse time where corporations steal our culture and spoon feed it back to us for profit and control.
You should watch this from the “don’t be evil days” days of google.: https://youtu.be/mhBpI13dxkI
Copyright isn’t, and never has been, about “protecting the artist”.
It was, and is, and has always been, about controlling the means of distribution.
Interestingly, if you look into the lecturerer of that video, they are very active on mastadon.
The central takeaway is a critical examination of copyright’s history and its current relevance in the digital age. The speaker promotes a shift in the conversation towards a model of creativity and distribution decoupled from traditional copyright, emphasizing that copyright was historically designed to protect distribution channels rather than support artists. He argues that the internet’s capabilities render those mechanisms obsolete and calls for a new understanding of creativity, free from the constraints of the current copyright system. Ultimately, the speaker urges the audience to question the widely held beliefs about copyright and to support the free flow of information. The youtube video is summarized by transcriptly
I’m just waiting to be able to download a house.
Didn’t the commercial use unlicensed music too? I feel like I remember there being a lawsuit for unpaid royalties or something.
Edit: Yup!
Edit 2: I’m an idiot who didn’t fully read what I posted.
Funny, but fonts can’t be copyrighted.
They say the ad used XBand Rough, an “illegal clone”.
If you redraw an entire font, pixel for pixel, manually, it is not an illegal clone. This happens all the time. The creators of the ad just used a copy that was free.
So ironic, yes, illegal, no.
pixel for pixel
I don’t think it was a bitmap font.
If you copy a font, bitmap or not, you’re doing it as a pixel map on a pixelated monitor.
most fonts nowadays are vector based, so they aren’t really created with pixels :)
Vector is still pixel maps. Open an SVG in a text editor 😉
