Re: [Freebangfont-devel] Best looking glyphs

[Deepayan Sarkar]

I would say yes, it _is_ illegal, unless you have explicit permission from the 
copyright holder to do so (no such permission seems to be given in the font, 
but it might be given somewhere else). The general fair-use rule is that if 
someone makes some copyrighted material available (whether for free or not), 
you can do whatever you want for your own use, but cannot re-distribute it 
without permission.

You should ideally provide a link to the site where adarshalipi is officially 
available from.

(While on this, tumi je lekho-r site-e usp10.dll-ta rekhechho, seta definitely 
be-aini.)

This is of course US law, I have no idea what India/Bangladesh laws say 
(obviously no one there seems to care). 

A long time back, I read in a VOLT mailing list message that most modern 
bengali fonts (excluding the more 'fancy' ones) are essentially clones of a 
typeface called 'Linotype Bengali'. I quote (from that message):

----------------------
Linotype Bengali is the registered name of a typeface developed by Linotype in 
the UK in 1977-79, originally for the CRTronic typesetter, and first used by 
the Calcutta newspaper Ananda Patrika Bazaar. It was developed by a group 
including Fiona Ross, then head of Non-Latin typogrpahy at Linotype, Dr 
Tarapada Mukherjeee of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, 
and the type designer Tim Holloway. Documentation relating to the typeface 
and dating from the period of release, is deposited at the St Brides Prinitng 
Library in London. 
----------------------

(I have the full - quite long - message if any of you are interested)

This seems quite believable to me, as the font used by several different 
publishers are almost identical (to the extent that we feel that somehow that 
IS the official bengali shape). And as far as I know (I am not a lawyer of 
course), typefaces are copyrighted (in India at least,  and Bangladesh as 
well, I would guess). If that is true, I think (and this is personal opinion, 
without any legal basis) that adarshalipi and all similar looking fonts all 
violate copyright.

Then of course, there is US law, which apparently says that typefaces are not 
copyrighted, only their implementations are. So, as long as we distribute the 
fonts from an US server, we can copy any typeface we want, provided we build 
the fonts from scratch using images of the glyphs and not the outlines 
directly.

Anyway, the whole thing is very complicated.


On Saturday 08 February 2003 12:53 pm, Kaushik Ghose wrote:
> Hiya,
> quick question.
> Is it illegal to distribute the adarshalipi fonts with the Lekho distro ?
> -kg
>
> On Sat, 8 Feb 2003, Robin Upton wrote:
> > Yeah, I'm convinced. It looks like Ekushey font is made up of proprietary
> > glyphs:(
> > Thanks for pointing this out, Deepayan. The glyphs came from a font
> > enttiled 'Bangla Qaran' that carried the name of Sayed Md. Rasel. He gave
> > me permission to
> > use them for Ekushey and I didn't enquire further. More fool me.
> >
> > Robin
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: address@hidden
> > [mailto:address@hidden
> > Behalf Of Deepayan Sarkar
> > Sent: 07 February 2003 21:58
> > To: Free Bangla Font Development
> > Subject: Re: [Freebangfont-devel] Best looking glyphs
> >
> > On Friday 07 February 2003 02:35 pm, Kaushik Ghose wrote:
> > > the fonts that "ekushey" uses are kinda nice.
> > > they are higher ascii TTF
> >
> > Almost identical to adarshalipi (definitely same origin). I have a
> > pfaedit screenshot with the two superposed at
> >
> > http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~deepayan/R/fntcmp.jpg
> >
> >
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> >
> >
> >
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