Typography is a tough career when it comes to making sure that you get paid your fairshare for your work in designing letters and numbers. United States copyright law allows people to copyright the font files that we use on our computers but claiming legal ownership of letter and number designs as they appear in typefaces is next to impossible.
AT THE TROUGH Typographers can trademark the typeface names and copyright the font files, but sadly little more can legally be done with respect to letter shapes.
Tonight we’re going to be joined by Phil Jenkins, a semi-professional typographer who claims that he saw an image of a computer screen in a past episode of Chewing the Cud. On that screen, he says, was his typeface he calls “Phil’s Marker Standard 420.”
Mr. Jenkins claims that he owns the shape of his letters and that we infringed on his rights by showing a 3second image of a computer screen with the typeface on it. Let’s get to the bottom of this.