Opti Fonts (Castcraft Software Inc.)

J. Bridges

Why do people often refer to OPTI fonts as pirated fonts? Or clones? How are these fonts different from Fontsite or Softmaker that appear to be copies as well? I purchased many OPTI fonts back in the early 1990s from catalogs. 

Fontsite and Softmaker fonts are sold through Monotype websites so if they had an issue they would probably not do so.

I have no beef with Fontsite or Softmaker. I purchased fonts from them too.

Now days I try to stick to Adobe Fonts or purchase licenses from MyFonts.

Mark Simonson

Castcraft was notorious in the sixties and seventies for pirating film fonts for headline setting machines, such as the Typositor. They would acquire a film fonts from franchisees of VGC (who also made the Typositor) or Filmotype or Alphabet Innovations, and then make duplicates and sell them to typesetting houses, usually changing the font names. Companies like Alphabet Innovations even put deliberate mistakes into individual fonts sent to franchisees just to try to see where Castcraft was getting them.

The OPTI fonts were all digitized from these pirated film fonts.

More info about Castcraft and OPTI on Luc Devroye's site.

J. Bridges

OK. Got it. I see now. Thank you.

Florian Hardwig

OPTI is a label used by Castcraft (also/previously known as Typefounders of Chicago and Type Films of Chicago) for digital fonts they produced around the early 1990s. My understanding is that virtually all of them are based on designs by others, made and distributed without authorization and without compensating the original designers or IP holders. Technically, many were likely based on the copies Castcraft previously made for phototype. They typically have names different from the original to avoid trademark issues. The company is long defunct and, ethical issues aside, the fonts are of subpar quality.

SoftMaker and FontSite are outfits that sell fonts which allegedly go back to digitizations made at URW (and others?). This German company was commissioned by other type companies and IP holders to digitize numerous typeface designs. Apparently the contracts not only allowed URW to distribute the digitizations themselves (as long as no trademarks were violated), but also to sublicense these digitizations. The story goes that SoftMaker and FontSite are among those sublicensees, and hence can sell these fonts legally. I haven’t seen those contracts myself so I don’t know if the claims hold water, but it would be an interesting piece of digital type history to investigate. (SoftMaker carries digitizations of designs that originated at Brendel / Typeshop. They also have original designs, like handwriting fonts.)

What is clear to me is that, when licensing such fonts, no dime goes to a typeface designer, let alone a living one. The technical quality of the basic digitization should be okay. If all you need is some cheap digitization of a decades-old design, I guess it doesn’t make a big difference – I’ve learned that type designers don’t always receive royalties from the “official” digitizations either. For my part, I try to steer clear of them. There are so many great contemporary type designs to choose from.

Peter Baker

Softmaker scooped up an old font of mine (Beowulf-1, released in the mid-90s before I knew anything about Libre licenses--it has only a copyright notice), renamed it as "British," and now sells it as part of their "Elegant Mediæval Fonts" package. Since I've never tried to make any money with the font, I haven't bothered to look into the legalities, but it certainly seems rather shady.

Thomas Phinney

Softmaker may have noticed that I did a revival of a particular font, as they renamed their very limited and very rough digitization of it to match my unique (but not trademarked) name. When I noticed years later (shortly after they released on MyFonts), they claimed it was coincidence, they’d done it first (which they could not prove, their only link was after I had blogged about the naming), and refused to consider changing the name. Their explanation…

Martin Kotulla: “Since MT owns the Columbus name, I wanted another name starting with "C" and containing at least one "o". So "Cristoforo" was created. Your thought process was probably similar.”

Me, unspoken since I did not want to give away anything at that point in the debate: IT WAS HIS FIRST NAME in his native Italian. (And there was already at least one typeface named Christopher.)

I leave it to the reader to judge whether Kotulla’s explanation has even the tiniest shred of plausibility.

And that’s why I didn’t release Cristoforo on MyFonts a couple years back.

Good lesson on the value of registering trademarks; only had I registered the trademark would MyFonts have recognized a prior claim.