deleted by creator
after they bought the rights to some font.
Now That’s What I Call Capitalism
I would be burning fucking buildings down. I’d be at the top of the FBI’s most wanted list.
Excellent time for Japanese devs to collectively develop some open-source fonts. Many hands make light work.
Excellent time for the Japanese to drop ideogram/logogram system and have an alphabet like a functional language.
Why? And what constitutes a “functional language” to you?
Is the fact that they can read, write, speak, and understand the language not “functional” enough for you? The point gets across to the person receiving the message.
You can even translate it to a “functional language” of your choice, with some restrictions. Translation restrictions aren’t isolated to Japanese either, there’s lots of languages that have things which don’t translate well, or at all, to English.
“Font” and “licensing” are not words that belong together.
“Oh, I took the alphabet and made it slightly different - you know, like every single person who ever learned how to write - only I did it on a computer so now you have to pay me forever if you want your computer to write like mine does”.
It’s artwork, like any other visual element in a game.
The problem is price-gouging. Japan should set national maximum rates. You drew every fucking kanji in a cool new style? Great, here’s some money. Emphasis on some.
It’s debatably artwork. Every single person has their own handwritten “font” - more than one if you write cursive and block letters. A font doesn’t have a message or a meaning, it is just a means for conveying information through text. I’m sure you can produce several examples of specific fonts that qualify as “artwork” (though it’s just a numbers game since there are literally hundreds of thousands of different fonts on the web, if not more) but that doesn’t prove that every font is automatically “artwork”.
We could also make the claim that every drawing is an artwork depending on how we define the word, but that doesn’t mean that every nine-year-old who draws an “original character” that’s just a green Sonic the Hedgehog should be able to use the legal system to bully other people because he’s an “artist”.
It’s absogoddamnlutely artwork. As much as the game itself, as mere software, is artwork. Someone put a ton of tedious work into every font you consider boring. Typography is a whole field of study, balancing aesthetic and practical concerns, and you want to roll your eyes and insist that only Wingdings is real art.
We could also make the claim that every drawing is an artwork
Yes.
These aren’t scribbled alphabets - which by the way are really fucking hard to do, when every copy of a letter has to look the same and still feel handwritten. These are letterforms conveying a particular tone, in use by industry professionals, for three thousand characters. Japanese has like three and a half alphabets to start with, and then Kanji is a whole mess of stolen Chinese ideograms. And they’re fucking complicated.
If you think you can bang that out with the effort of a child’s crayon doodle, to the quality necessary for commercial video game projects, I invite you to try. Apparently it’d come in handy.
I made exactly zero references to effort. Nice strawman. Yes, I’m sure some fonts take decades of hard, grueling effort to make. Just like I’m sure the nine-year-old’s green Sonic took him a lot of effort too. And no, I’m not implicitly saying it’s about talent either, before you accuse me of that.
Letters belong to humanity. Licensing your version of them because it is “unique” is bullshit because everyone’s writing is unique. Gatekeeping text presentation for money is so dystopic I have a hard time understanding how you support it, though I do admit your arguments seem to make a lot of sense if we ignore the fact that we’re basically discussing a copyright on how to write.
Ah, so you’re just saying words recreationally. There’s glory for you. What does art have to do with effort, or talent?
Fonts are protected works and you seem to understand why - but dismissively pretend an artsy font would be exceptional and distinct, instead of being as protected as any other illustration of the alphabet. None of them somehow own… the alphabet. Just the illustrations. Like any illustration. Even little Billy’s shitty Sonic OC has some copyright protections. He can’t slap his drawing of Blonic into a video game, but neither can Sega.
Consider Futura.
You have seen this font a million times and probably thought about it precisely never. It’s aggressively plain. But its development is a microcosm of early 20th-century art history, philosophy, and politics, to the point it was treated as degenerate by the actual goddamn Nazis, and then later adopted by them anyway. These boring-ass letters were innovative. This one sans-serif font has a five thousand word Wikipedia article. That’s not a complicated joke, and it’s only partially ingroup fart-sniffing. This is an element of culture you interact with every goddamn day. You’re doing it right now. Immense work has gone into designing and rendering whichever generic sans-serif you’re reading this in.
Yet even if it was still mono-spaced Codepage 437 in green on black, somebody had to draw all those pixels. Somebody decided it needed not one but two smiley faces. And it’s protected to the same extent as the BIOS code, one ROM chip over, for all the same reasons. It is an artifact of human labor, under practical constraints, for specific expressive purposes. It can’t not be.
I’ve done some Game Boy games. One has a custom font. I just winged it. It’s not important. But why would you expect those graphics to be any less protected than all the other sprites I drew?
I very much don’t want some corporation to be able to just take a 9 year old’s drawing and slap it on their game because someone thought it wasn’t artsy enough to be awarded protection.
Font and alphabet are not the same thing.
Obviously nobody can or should own the letter E, but you pretend that the font creator’s work adds nothing to that.
Someone had to do the work to make it look nice, beyond just being an E.
That is artwork inspired by the letter “E”, representing the letter E plus additional elements. It’s not correct to say that it is the letter E.
Now open a word processor, choose a font, hold your Shift key and tap the E key. What you’ll see on your screen is not “inspired by” the letter E nor does it represent the letter E. It IS the letter E. Therein lies the difference.
I chose a very extreme example, but it’s still just a stylized E, used for text. My word processor also has lots of different E’s to choose from, all stylized differently.
nor does it represent the letter E. It IS the letter E.
I have E’s that have serifs. The concept of letter E doesn’t say anything about that, but some fonts have them and others don’t.
Where do you draw the line? Serifs? Embossing? Floral motifs?
I designed a stylized E. Which side of the line does it belong?
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
The worst rent seekers come for everything
It’s also worth noting that in the case of games in Japanese, it’s not so easy for developers to find alternatives. While games using English can rely on system UI fonts, cheap commercial fonts or open-source options, the sheer number of characters used in Japanese means high-quality fonts are extremely difficult and expensive to make, so few affordable alternatives are available.
There’s already a decent selection of high quality, freely available Japanese fonts here: https://fonts.google.com/?lang=ja_Jpan
Free for commercial use?
Yeah:
Yes, you can use them commercially, and even include them within a product that is sold commercially. Usage and redistribution conditions are specified in the license. The most common license is the SIL Open Font License. Some fonts are under the Apache license or Ubuntu Font License. You can redistribute open source fonts according to those conditions.
https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#can_i_use_any_font_in_a_commercial_product
I’m guessing the problem is they want a relatively unique font to avoid looking the same as other games, and then once they’ve chosen their font they’re pretty much stuck with it unless they’re willing to change the look of their game (for live-service games at least). A number of the fonts there might work for new stuff though.
Not a fan of generative works, but this seems like a clear place to use it to fuck shit up.
Nih.hira.term.aigen.ttf Nih.katak.term.aigen.ttf Nih.kanji1.term.aigen.ttf Nih.kanji2.term.aigen.ttf Etc
Not the fault of the prompter if the resulting fonts appear to resemble licensed fonts, which are often slightly different copies of each other anyway.
Generative works cannot be copyrighted, so it would forever be in the public domain.
The only drawback would be that you would have to announce that you used slop in your game.
Generative works cannot be copyrighted
While that is generally true, a derivative work of a copyrighted work is usually copyrighted by the original author (see remixes of music where the remixer only partially owns a copyright for the remix but the original artist does as well). That is what makes generative AI so risky. A court could order “This is a automated modification of work XY, thereby the full copyright lies with the author of work XY.”
I was considering how copyrighted material can still be generated after writing that, so fair. If you fed in work a and made the same modification to each piece then it would just be a modified work a and not actually new work b.
Free fonts exist, so you don’t even need to resort to AI.
I hear you, and that was my first thought reading through the article.
According to TFA:
While games using English can rely on system UI fonts, cheap commercial fonts or open-source options, the sheer number of characters used in Japanese means high-quality fonts are extremely difficult and expensive to make, so few affordable alternatives are available. This is what made LETS an important service, but its revamped pricing and limitations have now put it beyond the reach of a good chunk of developers.
Maybe there are alternatives out there, and I think a crowd sourced open font would be a great idea. I personally have no idea how to go about organizing a project of that scope.
Also, tbf, my answer was more emotional bitching than a serious take.
Owning literal letters has got to be the dumbest shit I’ve heard in my life. Fucking leeches.
They own a font, which is a way of writing the letters. Wondering though, how many Japanese fonts are there?
