You wouldn't steal a font
147 points by gioele
147 points by gioele
font had been cloned and released illegally for free
In USA at least, font clones are legal. Copyright products the fixes form of the font file, but not the look of the typeface
Pretty sure this is worldwide. History is full of companies copying competitors’ typefaces under different names. Compugraphic (used to be a huge manufacturer of phototypesetting systems) and Bitstream did a lot of this.
I find it kind of awful. A typeface is a work of art, but copyright law doesn’t see that and treats it as an industrial part. It takes a lot of painstaking effort to design a quality typeface but there’s very little compensation for it.
Pretty sure this is worldwide.
I don’t think any jurisdictions give typefaces the full copyright term of an artwork (e.g. life+70yr), but they do get some protection in some countries. For example, Germany gives up to 25 years protection (10yr + 15yr renewal). Wikipedia has some pointers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_typefaces
“free Berkeley Mono font” is my highest trending search term for my blog. Folks want free fonts pretty bad.
The fact that you can basically clone fonts means we actually do have good OFL-licensed classics.
free Berkeley Mono font
is there a free clone for Berkeley Mono?
No, but it’s just a google hit to https://toast.al/posts/techlore/2024-04-19_berkeley-mono-on-lineageos-for-microg/
I’m assuming there is no warez linked from that page, and people just happen to find it because it mentions Berkeley Mono by name?
(I tried to read the text of the blog post, but the author seems to possess a bunch of unconventional ideas about the English alphabet and no respect for the readers, so I didn’t bother to decipher it)
I’m assuming there is no warez linked from that page, and people just happen to find it because it mentions Berkeley Mono by name?
Shrug! What even is “warez” in the year 2025? If I wanted a free copy of Windows, for example, I would go to microsoft.com.
And if I wanted a free copy of Berkeley Mono (I don’t, because I respect Neil Panchal’s labor-of-love and believe that he deserves fair compensation for those fonts), then the above-linked site is a reasonable place to grab it, because BerkeleyMono-Regular.woff2 and BerkeleyMono-Bold.woff2 are (of course!) sent to your browser anyway, allowing a person searching for free fonts to satisfy their hunger.
I thought the page just had the usual dumb cookie banner at the bottom, but if you read it, it turns out it’s actually a button to turn the orthography into standard English.
I did not see anything like that. Perhaps some of my anti-banner extensions caught and blocked it, or maybe something else happened.
Regardless, I don’t like websites that play games or push weird agendas at the expense of their visitors. So, rather than hunt for the “please respect my time and be normal” button, I just left the blog and made a mental remark to never visit it again.
standard English
What is “standard English”? Merriam-Webster dictionary? Oxford dictionary? Macquarie dictionary? Some publication’s style guide? English doesn’t really have a standard. Both thorn, þ, & eth, ð, have historical usage in English (from Futhorc to early Modern English) to represent a distinct sound most European languages don’t have—nor did the printing presses imported from the Netherlands—but the dental fricative is very common in English, enough that it easily can warrant its own letter like it historically did without the restriction of imported typesetting equipment.
There are - to my knowledge - no modern institutional resources in English-heavy cultures (which I would say is mostly comprised of the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and Ireland) that expect or prescribe the use of thorn or eth in common or regular communications. It is reasonable to infer from this that those characters are not considered “standard” by any measure in the modern English-speaking world despite the absence of a singular standard to reference.
It’s your blog and you can do what you want with it, but the decision you’ve made to use those characters as a baseline and then providing a judgmental message to users to switch it back to the form they’re most familiar with is not likely to engender good will.
I’m assuming there is no warez linked from that page, and people just happen to find it because it mentions Berkeley Mono by name?
Yes, I believe this to be the case
(I tried to read the text of the blog post, but the author seems to possess a bunch of unconventional ideas about the English alphabet and no respect for the readers, so I didn’t bother to decipher it)
There’s a bar on the bottom to swap to the well known variants of the phoneme rendering. For some reason, duplicated.
For some reason, duplicated.
Refactor bug. Thanks & fixed.
FWIW, which isn’t much, I rather like the use of ð and þ… but the site uses them in a way that does not match my pronunciation. For example, I do not pronounce “the” as “ð” - there is always at least a ⟨ə⟩ vowel, if not an ⟨i⟩. Also, I would pronounce “with” as “wið” rather than “wiþ” but I think that’s perhaps an American versus British difference.
Still, I like the idea!
Hardcore þorn anyone? Works for Iceland & has a historic precedence for a pretty unique sound, the dental fricative.
American English leans more unvoiced for the word “with”, but on some occasions voiced. It wasn’t until trying this experience with a small post I wasn’t assuming anyone really care to read (more notes for myself), that I noticed that I wasn’t entirely consistent in my own pronunciation. Another point backing this would be the Shavian dictionary entry for “with”.
The historic precedence is rather ambiguous in English. þ and ð were used interchangeably in Old English texts: either character could be used for either the voiced or unvoiced dental fricative. I think that was true in Iceland too until relatively recently, although I’m not sure about that. It’s a shame that we lost þ thanks to the printers with ye olde movable type: I fully support the use of unicode to bring it back.
It’s true both were used interchangeably. Thorn was a little more popular & probably ‘good enough’ since only either vs. ether are the only real confusing pair. But I mean if there were a hypothetical revival/reform, I would support a split on sound to mimic Iceland since it can help ESL folks that don’t know which to use—nevermind words like Thomas, Thames, & Thailand.
Separate paragraphs for separate thoughts on fonts. Berkeley Mono isn’t free or popular enough to warrant the massive effort of creating a cloned font like say Garamond or Helvetica. There is a lot more too it than just outlining glyphs.
Yes, another anti-piracy ad licensed a song for a local film festival, then used it all over the place, so: without his permission, or pirated.