Who owns DIN typeface? (Type questions about rights and public domain)

Fernando Díaz

Hello,

A student asked me a question about legal rights of DIN, and that I wanted to know for sure:

1) Is it legal to grab a vector drawing of DIN from the 90's, change minor details and sell it on the market with another name?

2) Is it legal to grab a print of DIN from the 1931, digitise it, change minor details and sell it on the market with another name?


I know that the original version was designed in 1931, so the rights should be public domain, right? 
Maybe a company let say... Monotype, owns the legal rights of the font's drawing and naming. Is it still public domain?

It's not entirely clear at least to me.
Any help will be welcome! 
Thank you

Thomas Phinney

There are a number of separate questions. But even before that....

To “change minor details” does not get anybody off the hook from any ethical issue, and probably not from any legal issue. The word “minor” should be a clue. But if somebody actually wanted to do 1 (modify a 1990s digital version of DIN and offer it for sale) I would suggest they consult a lawyer knowledgeable in this area first. Or ... just do not go there, for legal and other reasons.

Your student might want to consider that whether it is legal is not the only important metric. Some things are legal but not ethical. Some things are legal, but violate the social norms or professional standards of certain groups. 

If, for example, they are hoping to eventually become a professional type designer, they might care about the opinions and reactions of other people in the field. Those might influence their future employability, or their likelihood of some day getting hired for custom work by prestigious design firms or companies.

The case of DIN is complicated. On the one hand, the original 1930s set of lettering designs were explicitly done as an industrial standard, so different companies were encouraged and expected to make their versions. There have been many interpretations. More such interpretations are fine! Nobody will complain, as long as you are going back to the original. Hurrah!

BUT, if one is going to rip off somebody else’s specific modern 1990s interpretation of DIN, that is a different matter. Doing so for commercial purposes will definitely get negative attention.

Anyway, on to more details....

1) Is it legal to grab a vector drawing of DIN from the 90's, change minor details and sell it on the market with another name?

When you say “grab a vector drawing from the 90's,” is that vector drawing in the form of a digital font? I imagine so. Also, if they mean FF DIN, that was NOT just a direct digitization of the existing DIN, but a reinterpretation that added typographic subtleties that were not present in the original. So, basing one’s work on that is different than basing it on the 1930s version, at least from a design and ethical perspective, even aside from legality.

Names can be protected by trademark. But: the DIN name is not trademarked, in and of itself; and they propose to use another name (which they would need to do if they wished to trademark it). So existing trademark is not an issue.

Whether digital fonts are generally protected/protectible by copyright is currently disputed/unclear in the USA, following a period of several decades where it was widely believed to be the case. The swing in common understanding, in both directions over time, has been due to change in the US copyright office’s policies regarding accepting or not accepting copyright registrations for the code representing the fonts.

HOWEVER, copyright can potentially last a lot longer. Duration of copyright and whether fonts are even covered is not harmonized even within the EU, let alone globally. Copyright for fonts in some countries is clear (e.g. in Germany, maximum of 25 years), but not in all others. Duration can vary based on whether the copyright was registered, or may be the same duration regardless, and that can vary by country.

Typeface designs, in different jurisdictions, may be protected by other kinds of design rights. For example, there is design patent in the USA, but that must be explicitly applied for and is only 14 years (from date of grant, not date of application).

In most countries, other design rights have a duration of 25 years, or less. As with copyright, existence or duration of such rights may vary depending on registration.

It is definitely the case that digital fonts are protected under design rights in the EU. However, that protection is only three years for unregistered designs, and 25 years for registered designs. So, if for example the 1995 “FF DIN” has been protected in this way, that registration would expire in 2020. (Assuming I have the dates right. Obviously anyone deeply concerned with such issues would need to check into it more.)

2) Is it legal to grab a print of DIN from the 1931, digitise it, change minor details and sell it on the market with another name?

As far as I know, yes. Moreover, it also does not violate social norms or professional standards in type design.

Aaron Bell

To add some additional detail to Thomas' excellent reply. 

1) For the creation of Bahnschrift, Microsoft went back to the original specification (they licensed the original spec directly from the DIN Institute) and I worked from that. The spec is a bunch of poorly scanned images, and a set of tables that define the relationship of stem proportions and spacing. Was definitely a fun challenge to parse all of that and figure out how best to implement it. And when there was variance from the spec, it was purpose-driven to make the design more cohesive. 

In that project, I purposefully did not look at FF DIN or any other implementation of the standard for guidance or to "get ideas" for how to design certain letters. Everything was derived directly from the spec (or my interpretation thereof). As such, it is an entirely "original" version. 

As Thomas said, this is what the DIN group had intended by publishing the specifications—“here’s what the letters look like and how we want you to make them”. 

I would have felt very uncomfortable had someone said, “let’s just look at what FF DIN did and follow that”, or "here's some existing vector drawings to work from". 

2) Not that it is totally applicable here, but there’s actually a couple of trademarks that cover the word “DIN” in relation to type / lettering. 

Most relevant (by FSI): https://trademarks.justia.com/756/42/din-75642456.html

There’s also this one (by DIN themselves): https://trademarks.justia.com/779/70/din-77970007.html

Thomas Phinney

Thanks @Aaron Bell for all those details about Bahnschrift! Nothing surprising, but good to know.

(Huh. That was NOT supposed to be a sunglasses emoji in my previous post. I can't remember what it was that I typed, but... not that.)

This discussion reminds me, when I was working on Hypatia Sans, I made a deliberate choice to avoid looking much at other geometric sans typefaces. Especially during the caps work, when I looked really hard at ... Trajan. Then afterwards I compared and was shocked by how much some of my caps looked like Futura.

John Savard

Of course, Futura, Lydian, and Optima are three examples of typefaces that follow the classic Trajan column proportions for their caps, so perhaps that is not as surprising as it might seem.

Not that I'm telling you (or most of the others here) anything you don't know.

Thomas Phinney

Right. I had previously thought of Futura as just “geometric” and never realized that it too had followed the Trajan proportions so closely. I was hoping marrying Trajan-sans caps + geometric lowercase was a new idea, when in fact it was entirely unoriginal. (Lydian and Optima are more humanist in their lowercase forms than Futura.)

“All the old fellows stole our best ideas.”—Frederic Goudy
“The ancients stole all our ideas from us.”—Mark Twain

erm, apologies for thread drift.

John Savard

Also, to simplify what you and others have said here (and put the thread back on track): FF DIN is a typeface designed by Font Font, and of course (one should expect that) it is proprietary and so are the computer fonts that implement it. However, DIN is the name of the German standards agency, and FF DIN was made in imitation of a recommended style of lettering for drafting. Of course one can design one's own font, and even sell it commercially, based on the DIN standard for lettering, but don't copy anything directly from FF DIN.

However, I thought the DIN name would be not only protected, but heavily protected, by trademark law, to prevent companies from packaging products so as to convey a misleading impression that they conform to safety standards. Sort of like Underwriters Laboratories, CSA, ETL and other such bodies.

Aaron Bell

@John Savard There is a DIN logomark (https://trademarks.justia.com/owners/din-deutsches-institut-fur-normung-e-v-1727214/) that the institute has a trademark over that indicates if something conforms to the DIN standards. So one cannot display that mark on a product without approval from the DIN institute. 

I sort of thought that as long as one doesn't display that logomark, one would be OK to use the word "DIN", but apparently that application in a font scenario is also protected.

Helmut Wollmersdorfer

It's a little bit more complicated.

First is to look which local law applies. This depends on international agreements between countries, private international law or if applicable international trade law, and criminal law.

The term copyright in US is very broad. One aspect is the protection of creative work regulated by the Bern convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention accepted by 177 countries of the world, valid in the US since March 1st 1989. The protection period is 70 years after the death of the author.

Then there is trademark protection (must be registered like a patent, and an annual fee per country must be payed). Also if a font does not apply as creative enough for Bern convention it can be registered as a product pattern (German: Musterschutz = "pattern protection"), similar to trademark--regions, annual fee.

For fonts there was a prominent case in Germany--Linotype against MicroSoft. MS wanted to register Arial as a pattern, and Linotype won the case, because the court decided that Arial is just plagiarism of Helvetica. Helvetica is only a protected trademark. The design is not protectable. "Bread-and-butter-types" without individual creativity or character are not protectable under the "big" copyright. Disclaimer: I cannot guarantee how a court would decide in a single case.

Then there exist sui generis protection rights in the EU e.g. for databases or simple reproductions (a scan of a page from a book qualifies for this). The protection period for this sort of works is 20 years since creation or publication. 

For fonts there was an EU draft, but only Germany  (and a few countries) made national laws for sui generis protections of fonts for 2 years.

Maybe "big" copyright as software can apply for fonts as they contain "rules". Most jurists deny that the tables and rules in fonts qualify for protection. Again, I cannot guarantee if courts will follow this opinion.

Against DIN it is hard to say. There is one decision of a German court (Germany has a sort of caselaw binding other courts) DIN against an US non-profit organization, which copied and distributed printed DIN standards. DIN won the case. But this was not a font. It was a printed standard where the text and drawings in it qualified for copyright.

Hard to estimate. DIN Normschrift exists in many textbooks for technical education, in CAD software etc. IMHO it is a sort of bread-and-butter.

You can get it as free font here in 4 versions based on old designs:

http://www.peter-wiegel.de/TGL.html
http://www.peter-wiegel.de/TGL_0-16.html

Vasil Stanev

Helmut Wollmersdorfer said:

An insightful look into the legal matters, thank you.

You can get it as free font here in 4 versions based on old designs:
http://www.peter-wiegel.de/TGL.html
http://www.peter-wiegel.de/TGL_0-16.html

In the Cyrillic, some letters, particularly the K and Ж, could use some refinement.