There’s an infamous anti-piracy advertisement from back in 2004 that online oldsters will immediately recognize: “You wouldn’t steal a car,” it begins, complete with shakycam footage of some sketchy looking dude popping a lock, before rolling into various other types of theft and eventually equating it all with downloading a copy of Shrek 2. The ad makes it dramatically clear: Stealing Shrek will get you hard time in the slam when you’re inevitably busted for your criminal ways.
It was, and is, overwrought and silly, and so of course it inspired numerous parodies and memes: The British comedy series The IT Crowd did a particularly good one a few years after the original aired—in fact the old URL, piracyisacrime.com, now directs to The IT Crowd Clip on YouTube. I urge you to watch it. The ad itself was only around for a short time, but “you wouldn’t download a car” has endured in shitpost form for decades; it’s practically embedded in the fabric of the internet at this point.
But as good as many of these parodies are, none are as ridiculous (and funny) as the recent discovery that the world’s best-known anti-piracy ad may have used a pirated font.
The distinctive font used in the ad appears to be FF Confidential, created by Just van Rossum in 1992. But there’s another font called XBand Rough that’s virtually identical, and when journalist Melissa Lewis reached out to van Rossum about it, he told her XBand Rough is an “illegal clone” of FF Confidential.
This is where it gets interesting. After all this, another Bluesky user named Rib used the FontForge tool on a PDF file from the old anti-piracy campaign, available via the Wayback Machine, and discovered the file in question uses the XBand Rough font—the clone.
If I could steal a car by downloading it over the internet without depriving the original owner of it and with similarly low risk of getting caught/prosecuted for it I would absolutely steal a car. I wouldn’t steal a font tho, that’s just beyond the pale. :P
My eighty year-old parents have “borrowed” my car for a year.
I, too, would download one if I could.
And so would they I suppose. It crosses generations!
Sligthly off topic but I think this actually may be some kind of Mandela effect, because I think a large number of people actually think the commercial said ‘You wouldn’t download a car’ because of all the memes but it actually said ‘You wouldn’t steal a car’
I’ve heard that too, but I saw the original commercials and remember it as ‘you wouldn’t steal a car’.
Huh, I thought it was called the Mandala effect
I mean, just think about the meaning. “You wouldn’t download a car” doesn’t make any sense lol
Wasn’t there also a problem with the music rights?
Time to update that headline
The thing about the parasitic class is that they are not obligated to be logically congruent… They are always right.
These standards only apply to the wage slave class.
Didn’t the commercial use unlicensed music too? I feel like I remember there being a lawsuit for unpaid royalties or something.
Edit: Yup!
Edit 2: I’m an idiot who didn’t fully read what I posted.
From what I read that actually wasn’t true , at least not for the ‘you wouldn’t steal a car’ (or more officially: ‘Piracy. It’s a crime.’) clip.
Edit: Yup!
Your link claims the exact opposite.
Yeah. I didn’t fully read the article lol. Thats on me.
deleted by creator
Funny, but fonts can’t be copyrighted.
They say the ad used XBand Rough, an “illegal clone”.
If you redraw an entire font, pixel for pixel, manually, it is not an illegal clone. This happens all the time. The creators of the ad just used a copy that was free.
So ironic, yes, illegal, no.
Typefaces cannot be protected by copyright in the US, but by some stupid interpretation, fonts are software, which is protected. Really annoying how tech-illiterate judges can screw up something this obvious. Even if the technical implementation of a font was something that should be protected IP, it should be under patent law, not copyright.
There’s no rational reason typefaces shouldn’t enjoy protection.
In general, not interfering is the default position, there needs to be a reason it should enjoy protection.
Need to look at the goals the legislators were pursuing when they wrote the law. If protecting typefaces hinders the production of new books, that goes against the intent of the law. It might not make a difference on that front NOW, but back when typesetting was done by hand, and you needed a whole set of physical type for each typeface, it was a bigger deal.
The point of copyright is to encourage creativity, and there are reasons you might not care about encouraging creativity in typefaces. It’s a bit like trying to copyright how you pronounce a word, getting TOO creative here makes it more difficult to convey meaning, and people will do it anyway without the protection of copyright, it’s just a natural consequence of how language develops.
Yea, and in this instance, they were using a free font.
Personally I think the artistry in the typeface itself is what should be protected.
pixel for pixel
I don’t think it was a bitmap font.
If you copy a font, bitmap or not, you’re doing it as a pixel map on a pixelated monitor.
most fonts nowadays are vector based, so they aren’t really created with pixels :)
Vector is still pixel maps. Open an SVG in a text editor 😉
The font of Theseus!
I love our spiderman meme culture where everyone is pointing their fingers at each other accusing them of stealing their idea/song/art/etc.
I can never understand how people carry so much water for corporations who could care less about them. We are supposed to rearrange our entire society around their revenue streams.
The hypocrisy is unreal. I have been successfully holding onto my final shred of hope in the goodness of humankind, but this tips the scale. I give up. Now I only have despair in the badness of humunkind. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to drown my sorrow by bingeing on Napster, Scour, BitTorrent, newsgroups, and Gnutella.
I’m just waiting to be able to download a house.
With VR, you kinda can.
In fairness, I poisoned one food item in every music executive’s house as punishment for them being thieves.
I forgot about Dre but I was fairly comprehensive.
Did you forget, or you just act like you forgot about Dre?
You wouldn’t download a bear
Fuck you. You don’t know what I’m into!
I’d rather download a bear than download a strange man, that’s for sure.
It sucks that today, this message would hit hard with theaters of people cheering and clapping.
Didn’t they already get busted for not licensing the music?
This ad probably made more people aware of how easy it is to pirate movies and introduced the idea of doing that than it ever deterred people from pirating. I see the advertisement in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZm8vNHBSU
