The use of "special fonts" was claimed 1.5 million? These fonts have the highest probability of infringement

In order to compete for the audience's attention, designers often use "special fonts" on products such as trademarks, LOGOs, and advertisements. With the launch of the rights protection campaign by font companies such as Founder and Hanyi, many companies have successively received letters of claim from font companies.

Recently, a Taobao seller shared his experience of "font infringement" in the group: the seller claimed that his online store was told that the font Infringement, and seek help from surrounding sellers.

From the conversation in the screenshot above, it can be seen that the seller’s shop may not only be involved in infringement of these three fonts, and asked the seller how to solve it.

After watching this scene, many people are confused, and some people have never even heard of "font infringement".

In fact, lawsuits caused by "font infringement" are not uncommon.

Not long ago, Beijing Hanyi Keyin Information Technology Co., Ltd. also filed a Beijing Technology Co., Ltd. The company sued the court, requesting it to stop the infringement and claim economic losses of 1.5 million yuan.

When you search for "Font Infringement" in your browser, you will find that there are 4 related news in just one month.

There are also people who posted that they used "Microsoft Yahei" and would be informed of infringement...

Isn't "Microsoft Yahei" built-in with the software?

In fact, "Microsoft Yahei" is a font work designed and developed by "Peking University Founder Electronics Co., Ltd." Founder authorized Microsoft to use it through an agreement.

Not only "Microsoft Yahei", many software's built-in fonts must be authorized by the copyright owner.

If you use it without authorization, you will receive an infringement lawsuit from the copyright owner...

2007

Founder sued Blizzard for font infringement and claimed 100 million yuan. In 2009, the claimed amount was increased to 408 million yuan. In 2012, the Supreme People’s Court ruled that Blizzard and others should stop infringement and compensate Founder Company of Peking University suffered an economic loss of 2 million yuan and reasonable litigation expenses of 50,000 yuan.

2008

Fangzheng sued Guangzhou Procter & Gamble because of the use of Chinese characters on the packaging of Rejoice and other products, and claimed 1.34 million yuan, but ultimately lost the lawsuit.

2012

The popular movie "33 Days of Broken Love", due to the use of unauthorized fonts in the opening subtitles and text message subtitles, finally paid the copyright owner 20,000 yuan.

2016

"Nine-story Demon Tower" was sued for 510,000 yuan for using 7 characters in an unauthorized font.

....

Currently, court judgments for this type of infringement are generally 3,000-10,000 yuan per word. If font design plays a key role in product profitability, the amount of compensation will be even greater.

In addition to losing money, publicity materials that have been issued need to be withdrawn, and legal disputes also require a lot of investment. Enterprises and brands also have to bear a lot of economic losses in this regard, as well as image Adverse situation in publicity.

Why are commonly used fonts suspected of copyright infringement?

On the Internet, we see a lot of questions like "What should I do if I received a reminder letter from Founder". Many people think that Founder is just like some companies selling pictures for "phishing" ,crazy for money.

In fact, behind infringement and rights protection is not only the conflict of interests, but also the contest of recognition of creative value.

For example, in the case of Founder suing Blizzard font infringement in 2007, Founder claimed 100 million yuan at that time, and the claim amount rose to 408 million in 2009 Yuan, causing controversy from all walks of life. The case has been tossing for nearly five years, and the final judgment was made in May 2012, ruling that Blizzard and other defendants should pay 2 million yuan.

However, there are still many problems behind Fangzheng's victory in the lawsuit. a lot.

Liu Xiaokun, who was the vice president of Founder at the time, was very emotional: When the infringing "World of Warcraft" was released in other countries, the copyright owner was marked with the text and fonts of other countries. Why was it not published in China? How to do this?

According to industry insiders, it is not easy to simply design a font. A font library needs five or six thousand characters at least, and can reach ten to twenty thousand characters. Each character needs a designer Carefully outline and adjust stroke by stroke. Usually, designing a set of style fonts requires designing about 10,000 characters + punctuation marks. It takes a team of several people at least half a year, and at most two or three years to develop it.

The long development process and expensive development costs must rely on a large number of sales in the later stage, so that a font can make money.

So, as users of fonts, it is always right for us to behave properly. We can bother and scold copyright owners for their due respect and understanding, but in the end we still have to do things according to the law .

Which fonts are free?

Chinese fonts used in web design, free fonts include Song Ti, Fang Song, Hei Ti, Kai Ti, Li Shu, You Yuan. These fonts have been around for a long time and the copyright cannot be traced back. The pseudo-free commercial Microsoft Yahei font is actually not infringing when the browser displays IE browser, but you must be very careful when using it in advertising design or merchant's own decoration design.

• Siyuan font family

The Siyuan series of fonts is jointly developed by Google and Adobe’s online font library Typekityu. It provides 7 bold fonts of different sizes and thicknesses for the interfaces used by Google in China, Japan and Korea: ExtraLight, Light, Normal, Regular, Medium, Bold and Heavy , perfectly covering the entire system of Chinese characters.

Siyuan Blackbody is a sans-serif font, and its display effect on PC and wap interfaces is very outstanding. The well-regulated glyphs allow lazy designers not to infringe even if they don't deform them.

Siyuan Song Typeface is a font with serifs, with Chinese character details at the beginning and end of the strokes, suitable for Chinese typesetting and text paragraphs on inner pages. Currently there are Siyuan HeiTi and Siyuan SongTi series available for free commercial use.

• Founder Free Font Family

That's right, Founder still has a free series. As the most used by designers and the largest supplier of fonts, Founder has rich font styles, beautiful font shapes, excellent quality, and wide application scenarios, which are the reasons why designers prefer them.

If you really can’t give up, use the free commercial font series of Founder HeiTi, Founder Book Song, Founder Fangsong and Fang Zheng KaiTi.

• Ding font family

Arphic fonts are also frequently encountered by designers. In the past, many Arphic fonts were available for free commercial use, but now there are only 4 left: Arphtic PL Fine Shanghai Song, Arphic Zhongkai Simplified/Traditional, and Arphic Bao Song Bamboo.

• Wenquanyi font family

The Wenquanyi Chinese character font project is completely open source. It was created by Fang Qianqian (FangQ), a scholar in the United States, in October 2004. It is dedicated to solving the shortage of high-quality Chinese fonts on GNU/Linux.

At present, Wenquanyi has developed and released the first multi-standard dot matrix Chinese character library that completely covers GB18030 Chinese characters (including more than 27,000 Chinese characters), and the first open source vector font library that covers GBK character set (Wenquanyi Zhenghei) , and provides most of the symbols related to Chinese, Japanese and Korean in the open source font that currently contains the largest number of characters - GNU Unifont.

These fonts have gradually become the preferred Chinese fonts for Chinese desktops of mainstream Linux/Unix distributions.

Currently, Ubuntu, Fedora, Slackware, Magic Linux, and CDLinux use Wenquanyi as the default Chinese font. Debian, Gentoo, Mandriva, ArchLinux, and Frugalware provide official source support, while FreeBSD provides it in its ports.

• Wang Hanzong free font

Professor Wang Hanzong is a professor in the Department of Mathematics of Chung Yuan University, and independently designed and developed the silkworm font. Donated ten sets of WCL series fonts and 32 sets of fonts in 2000 and 2004 respectively. Released under the GNU GPL license. Although it is rare for the entire network to be permanently free, the font type is very close to the Arphic font, so you should pay attention to it when using it.

In order to avoid controversy, here is a statement: Wang Hanzong imitates Song Dynasty, Wang Hanzong Zhong imitates Song Simplified, Wang Hanzong Lishu, Wang Hanzong Zhongming style, Wang Hanzong Bold style, Wang Hanzong Teming style, Wang Hanzong fine round style, Wang Hanzong special round style, Wang Hanzong Die Round body, Wang Hanzong's Kanting style, Wang Hanzong's variety style, Wang Hanzong's running script, Wang Hanzong's variety style double empty Yin, Wang Hanzong's thick regular script and simplified script. Please feel free to use the Wang Hanzong fonts in other parts not mentioned.

• Droid Sans Fallback

Don’t look at the English title, this font is a font designed by Google for the launch of Android devices and entrusted Taiwan Huakang Technology for the characters of Southeast Asian countries. The font effect is very similar to Microsoft Yahei, which perfectly covers Simplified/Traditional Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and is completely free .

• Zhanku font family

As one of the major platforms in China where designers are active, in addition to purchasing copyrights for their own use, Zakuol also spontaneously organizes outstanding designers on the platform to collectively create and design a variety of free art fonts, which are unconditionally and permanently free for commercial use on the entire network.

The zhanku font series contains a full library of Chinese characters, numbers and English letters, basically covering all scenarios of use. Zaku Hei, Zaku High-End Hei, Zaku Happy, and Zaku Italia (English) are all open and free to use. The rough and casual font is also very suitable for creative design and advertising images. Although it is not exquisite enough, it is enough.

• Seto font

Seto font is a relatively small one. The name sounds very peaceful, but it is a Chinese font. The font style is handwritten, suitable for posters and advertisements.

• Cindy Font

Xindi fonts are also free, regardless of personal use or commercial use, but they are prohibited in certain fields.

Free fonts: Xindi Wenzhengming Style Free Edition, Xindi Xiaowanzi Elementary School Version, Xindi Afternoon Tea Basic Edition, Xindi Zhao Mengfu Style.

This article comes from the Internet, the copyright belongs to the original author, and it is for reference only!

I am Xiaoyong, for consultation, learning and communication, add WeChat 865261687

If you have any questions, you can ask them in the comment area below, and I will answer them when I see them.