At least he was apologetic about the shitty toilet.
The last time I ever directly gave Airbnb money the host accused my female work colleague of blocking the toilet with menstrual products and charged us 400CAD for a plumber to "fix" it. My colleague was incensed -- she angrily stated that the chronology was wrong, demonstrated that no aforesaid items were in her possession, but the host didn't believe it. We ended up with my card being billed before claiming successfully on travel insurance. I can't believe that happened in Toronto -- Canada is one of the nicest places on the planet -- but (US) Airbnb support took the hosts side instantly and wouldn't budge. We had a shitty toilet for a week!
The last time I stayed in one was in a urine soaked crash pad with cardboard covering the broken windows in Montréal. We spent five hours there around the unsafe electrical unit before they did actually sort something else out. The host didn't reply to emails and it later turned out had been arrested, explaining both his silence and the less than salubrious people we'd previously been sharing with.
I deleted my account and refuse to go in airbnbs now. Booking.com is far from brilliant but at least it's scatologically free so far...
I've found AntennaPod [1] absolutely brilliant for android podcasts -- it _just works_, downloads the audio files, is robust, etc. Very high quality software. This looks a bit more like a long-term storage solution for podcasts though, rather than shorter term listening. And of course with excellent metadata integration.
I haven't ever bought DRM content, and actively delete widevine from every browser I encounter. It's amazing how often it's used for adding unique IDs, amongst other evil purposes.
That is an absolutely brilliant turn of events – strong evidence that the font in an anti-piracy campaign was itself arguably a copyright-infringing knock-off.
Someone should sue FACT for copyright infringement – and refuse to settle.
How does that square with this article, which says that the music was composed by Dutch musician Melchior Rietveldt specifically for the ad? (And that they failed to pay him properly for the use of the music.)
A typeface design, in the U.S., no, but the digital font file comprising outline data and instructions, according to current U.S. law, for an overview of current case law and a proposal see:
There's no evidence XBAND Rough was extracted from a digital source bit-for-bit, unless someone can point to any?
It seems like it was just a hobbyist project to recreate the look of the font from the anti-piracy ads? Which is 100% legal.
Edit: OK, so the original font appears to be "FF Confidential"? Why didn't the post even mention that? So maybe it is a digital clone, which would be illegal. But then strange that there aren't any DMCA takedowns of it on major font sites?
1. Catapult Entertainment made/commissioned XBAND Rough as a clone of Confidential for their use somewhere (promotional materials, PC software, who knows?). The font file contains the text "Copyright 1996 Catapult Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved".
2. The "You wouldn't steal a car" campaign pirated Catapult's copyrighted font file. I think they got away with it because Catapult was no longer in business at that point. They were acquired by Mpath Interactive in 1996 and Mpath's IP got acquired by GameSpy in 2000.
"It looks the same" is completely different than having been directly extracted from digital source.
If the digital source is the only thing that can be copyrighted, then you have to prove the digital source is what was used inappropriately. If you can't prove that, either because it didn't happen or because there's no technological way to prove it, then you can't prove copyright infringement.
Ages ago, I consulted on a case where a converted font was included in a product --- it was even simpler than https://luc.devroye.org/kinch.html since no transformations were applied --- just had to figure out which version of which font editor was used to open up the font file and then which settings were used to re-generate the font in the new format used for the infringing product.
If a digital font file is used as a source, it's probably too much work for the thief to erase all traces of that --- whether or no it should be acceptable to re-create a typeface design w/o crediting the original designer and adhering to their intent in terms of licensing and distribution is a different discussion.
If I were going to knock it off I'd duplicate the splotching exactly, too. I'd prepare as sample as a bitmap, use any of the various raster-to-vector tracers on it to get an SVG, clean up the SVG of any conversion artifacts, then make it into a type format. (Heck, there's probably a fun problem in here to train an algorithm to do the cleanup and conversion. You could probably knock-off the hinting and ligatures, too.)
XBAND Rough could not have been inspired by those ads, as the OP shows the ads are using XBAND, and not FF Confidential, the original tyepface it cloned.
If it were the same file, it wouldn't be a "knock-off." It would be something like Optifonts. Very frowned upon, but definitely not illegal. Also, the kerning is usually trash, there will be way too many nodes in the vectors, and things may be missing. Annoying to work with, but in the case of Optifonts, free (because they're long out of business.)
Maybe not in the US, but fonts do enjoy copyright protection in at least some European markets.[1] I frequently encountered this campaign on DVDs for rent in the local Blockbuster equivalents, so I don't think it is entirely theoretical infringement, either.
In the US you can't copyright the shape of a font. You can copyright the programmatic description of a font.
Design patents have been awarded for fonts. Trademark and trade dress protections could apply to the specific use of a font but not the font itself. The name of a font itself can be protected by trademark, as well.
Edit: Back in the mid-90s versions of Corel Draw came with a Truetype editor. A friend of mine made "knock off" versions of fonts they liked from magazines, etc, and made them freely available on his ISP-provided web space. They drew them by hand, using printed samples as the inspiration.
Over the years they got some angry messages from a few "type people" who didn't like that they'd made freely available knock-offs of various fonts. (I remember that "Keedy Sans" is one they knocked-off and got a particularly angry email about.)
Further aside: My fiend made a sans serif typeface that has a distinct pattern of "erosion" at the edges and voids within the letters. It's easy to tell when it's the font he made. For the last 30 years I've kept samples of the various places I've seen it used, both on the Internet and on physical articles. I find it so amazing that a TTF file made by a kid in Corel Draw in 1994 or 1995 ended up being used in advertisements, on packaging, etc.
But you can Copyright the Name of a font. But yes long standing rule says you can copyright how letters & numbers look. Note that if you make a font that contains your own “artwork’ that does not represent a letter or number you can get protection for that.
And only fairly recently (in the past 30 years—I forget when Adobe won this court case) the courts ruled you can protect the code for generating a fonts look from being copied.
You can, entirely legally, make a copy of any font and distribute it freely.
You can't copy the font files themselves, but you can make visually indistinguishable new fonts with the same shapes because the shapes are not protected by copyright.
Additionally though, some fonts have design patents, which does protect the shape. Unlike copyright which has absolutely crazy expiration (like 150 years occasionally?) these patents only cover 15 to 20 years or shorter if abandoned.
So if I already have the file (legally acquired or not), I'm free to use it for print? Cause obviously distributing T-shirts isn't distributing font files?
> was itself arguably a copyright-infringing knock-off.
In US law, there is no such thing. The shape of a glyph (or many) isn't even slightly copyrightable. This is settled law. Fonts (on computers) have a special status that makes them semi-copyrightable in that some jackass judge from the 1980s called them "computer programs" and so they have the same protection as software... but this won't protect against knockoffs.
Is this fair? It actually takes a lot of work (I assume) to design letter's shapes. Of course, not counting those who just trace 16-th century font without paying a compensation.
>Under the Feist ruling in the US, mere collections of facts are considered unoriginal and thus not protected by copyright, no matter how much work went into collating them.
This person isn't just collecting existing letter shapes; inventing a new letter shapes would be protected by copyright?
You aren't inventing a new letter shapes - letters already exist. You are modifying how they look, and that's not considered creative enough.
There are lots of things that can't be copyrighted.
For example you can't copyright an anatomy drawing: https://www.skeletaldrawing.com/licensing (i.e. the layout of the bones, etc) but you can copyright your specific drawing - but someone else could draw in the same style and not violate your copyright.
Same here: You can't copyright the shape of the letters, but you can copyright you specific ttf program (expression), but someone else can make the same letter shapes if they want.
You can say the same about drawing of a cat: you are not inventing new animal here. But for some weird reason cats are copyrighted and letters are not.
There are many ways to draw the same letter, as there are many ways to draw a cat.
Also if one draws letters that look like cats, will they fall under copyright protection?
If someone draws a cat, and the next person draws basically the same cat, there is no copyright infringement.
You need something "extra", some kind of style that is distinct.
I'm not saying your drawing has no copyright - it does, if someone reproduces it exactly that's illegal. I'm saying if someone makes the same type of drawing, in the same style, that's not infringement - even if they looked at yours, as long as they drew it themselves.
> Of course, not counting those who just trace 16-th century font without paying a compensation
I can't tell which way you mean this, but that sounds similar to the situation with most public domain musical compositions - the manuscripts may be completely open but a specific typesetting can still under copyright. And like that case, "just" tracing a font / typesetting a composition is still a fair amount of work.
Are fonts really programs? Is a digital image file also a program?
A font file is more like a config that’s used by your OS to render something, there’s no real interactivity in fonts (except some ligatures but those are just static tables, right?).
We’re talking about copyright here. A typeface on its own isn’t copyrightable. The judge ruled that turning a typeface into a digital font involves writing a nontrivial computer program, which is a creative work under US copyright law. That simply is true. It doesn’t matter whether you can write “apps” in TrueType; you can write digital fonts in it.
Many things are copyrightable that shouldn't be. When you can spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress to get them to extend copyright protections beyond reason, that tends to happen.
In the United States, it is settled precedent that typefaces are not copyrightable. That doesn't change just because they became digital in 1984.
I'm friends with a professor of steganography. Apparently most cinema watermarking is based on very heavily error correcting codes within the wavelet domain that are specifically designed such that they are resistant to collusion attacks, i.e. the statistical properties of the "indistinguishable from random" noise are such that it is highly correlated among different viewers such that they are very much more likely to have bits in common rather than bits different. I'm relatively sure that the obvious things like taking the mean of two images (or randomly picking one of them) have been considered.
Put it this way -- You've got huge amounts of cover data (a hard drive's worth) and a desire to encode at most, what, 128 bits of data, across about two hours, with as much redundancy as possible. There are plenty of patents that explain in detail how.
My friend considers this a moderately distasteful problem, and mostly works on steganalysis, identifying where steganographic techniques have been used, as he thinks it's more interesting and frequently more morally justified...
It may be a European stereotype to say this, but I perpetually find it odd that Americans are so afraid of naked (female) bodies and, on entertainment at least, so blasé about violence. In Denmark, Aarhus science museum (a very kid friendly place) has an exhibit all about aging, featuring life size large naked photos of about ten people of all ages showing what changes throughout life.
When I had a facebook account I was in a group of there named like "steel is real - classic road bikes" where I used to post stuff. I'd bet it still exist. Most of the people on this group seemed to be what they call "baby boomers" from both Europe and the USA.
Between the funny/silly/cool stuff one day I posted a picture of a sculpture resembling a feminine silhouette made of bicycle chains (can't find the picture online, most probably it was from Seo Young-Deok). I thought it was really cool how the artist used the chains and found their "plasticity" to create surfaces.
It wasn't the first time I posted "art-sy" stuff; I recall posting a picture of Alicja Kwade's "Journey without arrival" (think a warped steel road bicycle).
This was around 10 years ago but I still can recall how some people there called me names and everything beyond because I was a "pervert" or something like that because I dared to post a picture resembling a naked woman. Mods ended locking the post but didn't removed it.
But then when that same people made mildy xenophobic/racist comments against me out of nowhere (before of after that incident), nobody bat an eye.
This is probably difficult, but if everyone collectively didn't use services that had such egregious requirements it would likely die quickly. The companies being requires to do such things would have to start pushing back against government policies that are killing their business.
Considering everyone currently and without a second thought lets Apple scan their face just for the convenience of unlocking their phone I think this is a lost cause.
Please don't add play integrity to your app. There are many of us using custom ROMs, and it can relatively easily be worked around, but very much is often a giant screw you to technical users...
I am trying to learn Danish. I cannot agree with this enough.
Consider "halvtreds," the Danish word for 50. A reasonable person might expect it to mean "half-three" based on pattern recognition and the fact that tre is three. But no! It's actually a compressed version of "halvtredsindstyve," meaning "half-third-times-twenty" or (2.5 × 20).
This continues with "tres" (60), "halvfjerds" (70), and "firs" (80)—all using a vigesimal system that, if you studied French, seems reasonable.
Except, well, the Danes don't properly sanitize their inputs. "femoghalvfjerds" (75) translates to "five-and-half-fourth-times-twenty," combining decimal and vigesimal systems with zero regard for foreigners...
> "halvtredsindstyve," meaning "half-third-times-twenty" or (2.5 × 20).
And you even took a shortcut there, AIUI it's "three-minus-a-half" (and that many "twenty", vigesimal as you said) for the "2.5", kinda like roman numeral `IX` is nine ("ten minus one" because the `I` is before the `X`) so it's really an oddball mix of multiple ways to count.
(Source: my wife had a go with learning Danish as well, and we spent a little time going down that rabbit hole. I didn't even try, I'm sticking to easy things like Japanese)
> The most appropriate null hypothesis in this lovely study is “does theanine REDUCE anxiety”, not “does theanine change anxiety either up or down”.
I disagree with this. You have a prior belief that theanine might reduce anxiety; if you wanted to you could codify that subjective belief and perform some variety of Bayesian hypothesis test [1] and compute a Bayes factor. The main reason that one-sided tests are advocated for is power; that is often the same as having a prior belief in disguise. Why not quantify it?
However, scientifically, if the data conclusively show that "theanine increases anxiety" that is a meaningful, non-artefactual result: it is hugely important to be sensitive to the answer 'you are wrong' and may well ironically spur development in a direction to help understand what is going on. I personally think that one sided tests are best avoided except in the case where it is physically impossible to have an effect in the other direction. Examples of this are rare, but they do occasionally exist.
Sure. I can see your point, but the most reasonable posterior probability of the null given the biohacker community’s belief is one-tailed. This also gives more power to reject the null.
The last time I ever directly gave Airbnb money the host accused my female work colleague of blocking the toilet with menstrual products and charged us 400CAD for a plumber to "fix" it. My colleague was incensed -- she angrily stated that the chronology was wrong, demonstrated that no aforesaid items were in her possession, but the host didn't believe it. We ended up with my card being billed before claiming successfully on travel insurance. I can't believe that happened in Toronto -- Canada is one of the nicest places on the planet -- but (US) Airbnb support took the hosts side instantly and wouldn't budge. We had a shitty toilet for a week!
The last time I stayed in one was in a urine soaked crash pad with cardboard covering the broken windows in Montréal. We spent five hours there around the unsafe electrical unit before they did actually sort something else out. The host didn't reply to emails and it later turned out had been arrested, explaining both his silence and the less than salubrious people we'd previously been sharing with.
I deleted my account and refuse to go in airbnbs now. Booking.com is far from brilliant but at least it's scatologically free so far...
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