Hello Legal,
I just bring this up again because the pyfiglet contributors and myself
are still waiting for an answer.
Should I maybe ask this question somewhere else? Or can we have an
update if anything has been done?
Also, can the FE-legal blocker be removed from the review request now
that all the fonts that remain are under an Open-Source license anyway?
Greetings,
Lyes Saadi
Le 23/10/2021 à 21:30, Lyes Saadi a écrit :
> Hello Legal,
>
> I'm bringing back a discussion from 2012[1]: Figlet fonts!
>
> Indeed, I am trying to package python-pyfiglet[2] as a dependency for
> other
> packages. But, after the review, it came up that a lot of weird fonts
> were
> included. At the time, I didn't know anything about the discussion,
> and decided
> to abort everything.
>
> Recently though, a developer contacted me through the bug report, and
> proposed
> to help on the issue. He triaged the fonts and separated them
> depending on
> whether they were Open-Source or not, and we were thus able to create
> a clean
> package with none of the problematic fonts in it.
>
> In that discussion[3], emerged the fact that a discussion over this
> already
> happened ([1]), but it seems that either no consensus was reached, or
> that such
> consensus was lost to time as I wasn't able to find any conversation
> on figlet
> either on legal or devel mailing lists archives. And, it seems that
> the issue
> was just simply avoided since figlet ended up removing the problematic
> fonts
> anyway.
>
> But, upstream would like to keep the problematic fonts if possible in
> Fedora.
> And so, I would like to ask Legal to either give me the answer, if it
> actually
> was a settled matter, or to reach a consensus on Figlet fonts.
>
> To resume the situation (as I understand it, I am not a lawyer,
> obviously):
> In the US, fonts glyphs are not copyright-able as it is considered
> insufficiently creative. For the same reason, Bitmap fonts (fonts
> defined pixel
> by pixel) are also not copyright-able, as they are only considered as
> data which
> represents glyphs. But, Vector fonts (fonts defined using drawing
> instructions
> and code), is, on the other hand, copyright-able because it is defined
> through a
> software code.
>
> Then, we come to Figlet fonts. For those not aware of what Figlet
> fonts, they
> are also known as ASCII fonts:
>
> __ __ ____ __ ____
>
> / / / /__ / / /___ / / ___ ____ _____ _/ / /
>
> / /_/ / _ \/ / / __ \ / / / _ \/ __ `/ __ `/ / /
>
> / __ / __/ / / /_/ / / /___/ __/ /_/ / /_/ / /_/
>
> /_/ /_/\___/_/_/\____( ) /_____/\___/\__, /\__,_/_(_)
>
> |/ /____/
>
>
> The issue with those is that no ruling (as far as I know) ever
> concerned that
> type of font in US Court. Though, one argument would be that Figlet
> fonts are
> similar to Bitmap fonts, as they only contain data about glyphs, and
> do not, in
> the same way as Vector fonts do, contain code giving to the computer
> drawing
> instructions for the fonts. As such Figlet fonts are not modular, or
> extensible,
> they just contain raw data about a font.
>
> But still, all this is speculation, and, as I said, I am not a lawyer,
> so I
> don't have any slight idea if such a defense would hold in court.
>
> I hope to have resumed the situation clearly enough and that I didn't
> make any
> mistake.
>
> Greetings,
> Lyes Saadi
>
> [1]:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=820642
> [2]:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1876108
> [3]:
https://github.com/pwaller/pyfiglet/issues/89
>
> PS: Can we remove the FE-legal blocker from the review request now
> that all the
> fonts have been sorted out?
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