Romanée – New Release?

Scott-Martin Kosofsky said:

This University of California Davis law review article, from 2009, offers a pretty good overview of U.S. copyright law in regard to fonts and typeface design, as well as other aspects of U.S. law that bear upon it: https://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/issues/43/1/articles/43-1_Lipton.pdf. The 1988 decision  of U.S. Copyright Office on the copyrightability of digital typefaces can be read here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Policy_Decision_on_Copyrightability_of_Digitized_Typefaces.

Please, never cite the 1988 decision of the US copyright office without highlighting even more that they dramatically revised that decision in 1992 (arguably reversed it, in effect, for modern digital fonts), just three years and four months later.

I'm sad to see this discussion deteriorate to such an extent. It's an interesting subject—to me, at least—with important principles that bear discussion and consideration, and with different points of view that are predicated, in part, on the very different national legal standards of copyright. These are not just matters of law, but also of moral outlook and the balance of property rights versus the legitimacy of interpreting older traditions. I hope we can get it back on track.

I think when Hrant introduces the term 'cultural progress' into such discussions, he is usually begging the question. Unless one is going to take a kind of act utilitarian, case-by-case basis to considering whether making a particular work available under some particular circumstance constitutes cultural progress, one has to consider broader principles and a longer historical span, because culture is not the business of a moment.

The first question would be whether the principles of intellectual property law are in general good for cultural progress, and I would argue that they have historically been so, at least in the context of civilisations in which land, material goods, and especially capital are held as private property. Leaving out of such law the things that people actually make would not only be illogical but would unfairly advantage the owners of capital even more than they are already.

The second question would be whether typical implementations of intellectual property law are good for cultural progress, and I would say on balance that they tend to be, even though they give rise to situations we don't agree with or, even, that seem to be counter to the principles on which those laws were established. Such laws usually seek to balance the benefit to the makers of things with benefits to the community, and that balance isn't difficult to disrupt.

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In considering the case of Romanée and other Dutch type designs in terms of cultural progress, I think that an interesting thing — a culturally interesting thing — happened in The Netherlands in the 1990s. At a time when the rest of the typographic world was rapidly becoming a largely undifferentiated globalised business selling the same things in all markets at generally decreasing prices, some then relatively young Dutch type designers decided to take ownership — both symbolically and practically — of the particular typographic heritage of their particular country, and to establish a local market for high quality and generally more expensive products from that heritage. TEFF was one aspect of this activity; Dutch Type Library was another.

Have those people done everything right? Probably not, but I still think the approach they adopted is an interesting one, and I would suggest that it might even, in the insistence on the distinctiveness of a particular culture, constitute a kind of progress.

Oliver Linke said:

Good or bad guys?
I understand @ybaggar when he sais that this looks like us trying to be the good guys while TEFF prefers not to contribute to this thread. Might be true that this image emerges. Although I can say that this was never our intention.

That is not what I said. I was reacting to hrant who seemed to portray it this way, I didn't said you did.
Anyway, to me this was a minor aparté since the main point I was making is that cultural progress would be superior if, instead of marketing a revival with the same name, you market a contemporary typeface that draws inspiration from Romanée, but offers more… your own take. It would then not be "Romanée" anymore, and should logically use another name. That would, imo, resolve the legal/ethical matter and be of superior cultural and marketing value.

That is just my take on things and if you disagree I think it's up between you, your moral compass, and teff to find the solution, as the opinions offered here do not represent the type community or society as a whole. Especially when the level of discourse will be diminished by hrant's feeling that debating his views very tiringly and calling people "Gollum" is just being "inconvenient".