Irony today: French Hadopi new Anti-Piracy logo infringes on copyright.

Fontfeed.com is on this story as well, they were Metafiltered (which seems to have caused their servers to die for the moment)... The reason I'm bringing that up is because of the fucked up debate going on in that thread. Lets quote this gem of a comment; "Given the current environment on the Internet it should not be the job of the end user to ensure that every font, photo, file is legitimate and that all licenses have been paid."

Right, well, the job does lie on the designer who is selling his work later. Built with 'stolen' fonts. Oooooops.

In other news NBC Sued in Font-Related Flare-Up

NBC's legal team has one more headache on its hands. On Tuesday afternoon, the company was served with a lawsuit by the Font Bureau, one of the country's leading typographic design firms and the company responsible for crafting typefaces for the likes of Apple, Microsoft, and the New York Times Co. What would prompt a company that designs fonts to wage a legal assault on the media conglomerate? It seems NBC didn't secure the rights to use a handful of Font Bureau's trademarked typefaces. The same ones, we should add, that have been used as part of NBC's fall marketing campaign to tout shows like The Jay Leno Show, Saturday Night Live and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.
In a trademark and copyright infringement lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court, Font Bureau argues that NBC only paid for a single license—which would only permit the company to install the typefaces on a single computer—and only paid to use a limited number of fonts. But NBC went ahead and copied the fonts to a bunch of other computers within the company, Font Bureau claims, and also started using several other fonts for which licenses were never obtained. (In case you're wondering, the typefaces in question include Bureau Grotesque, Interstate and Antenna.)

Hahahaha. :)

What grates me is that the Metafilter Thread I linked people are all discussing consumers use of fonts. This isn't about that, and the designer should know better.

Really, go read the Fontfeed post now (it's back up, it was boingboinged), he's checked with all sorts of people to get more juicy facts, like rush orders on Fonts in teh logo on the day of the presentation;

Either way the logo infringed at least two licenses. Obviously Bliss which was used in both versions had never been licensed by Plan Créatif prior to last Monday, three days after the official presentation. Nor was FS Lola, and if the Bienvenue version was initially intended to be the final logo as we all surmise, then the typeface even isn’t available for licensing at all.