... they already have two syllabaries. They're not about to upend their whole writing system just to maintain foreign intellectual property.

I will gladly replace dishwashers with dishwashing machines if they are energy, water, and cost-efficient, but I don't believe we are discussing artisan dishwashing. This borderline association approaches sophistry, so I think it is much better to discuss the use of art and the corporate hoarding of artwork. [Monotype does seem to pay font creators well for royalties.](https://foundrysupport.monotype.com/hc/en-us/articles/15769163469076-Monotype-Fonts-Royalty-Model-FAQ). My frustration is the aggressive pricing models, the growth of monotype to where they own the whole market (per tfa), and the way they are [demanding payment for fonts without checking to see if there is an existing license.](https://www.insanityworks.org/randomtangent/2025/11/14/monotype-font-licencing-shake-down). Basically, I will encourage and pay for fair business practices. Squeezing people for cash pisses me off. I'm not knowledgeable enough to pretend to create a free font set in this manner, but I would advocate creating tools that would fuck up the market. Open fonts would be great, but again tfa says that it's too complicated of a data set for that, and the market is too small for independent artists. Lastly, my answer wasn't a valid solution. There are plenty of legal and social hurdles to it.

I made exactly zero references to effort. Nice strawman. Yes, I'm sure some fonts take *decades* of hard, grueling effort to make. Just like I'm sure the nine-year-old's green Sonic took him a lot of effort too. And no, I'm not implicitly saying it's about talent either, before you accuse me of *that*. Letters belong to humanity. Licensing your version of them because it is "unique" is bullshit because *everyone's* writing is unique. Gatekeeping text presentation for money is so dystopic I have a hard time understanding how you support it, though I do admit your arguments seem to make a lot of sense if we ignore the fact that we're basically discussing a copyright on how to write.

That is artwork inspired by the letter "E", representing the letter E *plus additional elements*. It's not correct to say that it *is* the letter E. Now open a word processor, choose a font, hold your Shift key and tap the E key. What you'll see on your screen is not "inspired by" the letter E nor does it represent the letter E. It IS the letter E. Therein lies the difference.

>I very much don't want some corporation to be able to just take a 9 year old's drawing and slap it on their game because someone thought it wasn't artsy enough to be awarded protection. Yours is a completely fair statement to which I have no objections.

Monotype may as well be the mafia. My wife's work had to deal with those assholes, too, after they bought the rights to some font. They're just shaking companies down for cash.

I chose a very extreme example, but it's still just a stylized E, used for text. My word processor also has lots of different E's to choose from, all stylized differently. Where do you draw the line? Serifs? Embossing? Floral motifs? I designed an E. Which side of the line do it belong? 

Ah, so you're just saying words recreationally. [There's glory for you.](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12/12-h/12-h.htm#%3A%7E%3Atext=When I use a word) Fonts are protected works and you seem to understand why - but dismissively pretend an artsy font would be exceptional and distinct, instead of being as protected as any other illustration of the alphabet. None of them somehow own... the alphabet. Just the illustrations. Like any illustration. Even little Billy's shitty Sonic OC has some copyright protections. He can't slap his drawing of Blonic into a video game, but *neither can Sega.* Consider [Futura.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futura_(typeface)) You have seen this font a million times and probably thought about it precisely never. It's aggressively plain. But its development is a microcosm of early 20th-century art history, philosophy, and politics, to the point it was treated as degenerate by the actual goddamn Nazis, and then later adopted by them anyway. These boring-ass letters were *innovative.* This one sans-serif font has a five thousand word Wikipedia article. That's not a complicated joke, and it's only partially ingroup fart-sniffing. This is an element of culture you interact with every goddamn day. You're doing it right now. Immense work has gone into designing and rendering whichever generic sans-serif you're reading this in. Yet even if it was still mono-spaced Codepage 437 in green on black, somebody had to draw all those pixels. Somebody decided it needed not one but two smiley faces. And it's protected to the same extent as the BIOS code, one ROM chip over, for all the same reasons. It is an artifact of human labor, under practical constraints, for specific expressive purposes. It can't not be. I've done some Game Boy games. One has a custom font. I just winged it. It's not important. But why would you expect those graphics to be any less protected than all the other sprites I drew?

I hear you, and that was my first thought reading through the article. According to TFA: >While games using English can rely on system UI fonts, cheap commercial fonts or open-source options, the sheer number of characters used in Japanese means high-quality fonts are extremely difficult and expensive to make, so few affordable alternatives are available. This is what made LETS an important service, but its revamped pricing and limitations have now put it beyond the reach of a good chunk of developers. Maybe there are alternatives out there, and I think a crowd sourced open font would be a great idea. I personally have no idea how to go about organizing a project of that scope. Also, tbf, my answer was more emotional bitching than a serious take.

I was considering how copyrighted material can still be generated after writing that, so fair. If you fed in work a and made the same modification to each piece then it would just be a modified work a and not actually new work b.

Actually, you could totally have demand for that font set.

Just because a category is fuzzy doesn't make it invalid. That's whynwe have laws to force standardized definitions of various concepts. You arguing against whatever definition I proposed would indict only that definition, and not the broader concept that there is an important line to begin with.

You know what? You are right. That Wikipedia article was a fascinating read. I recant my previous statements uniquivocally, sincerely and unironically. Thank you for the humbling lesson on what it's like to be on the left side of the Dunning-Krueger curve. I'm an ignorant fuck.

I don't think it's okay, but I also won't judge people with limited resources for using it for things that they realistically can't afford. I believe that humans should design every single aspect of any video game. Monotype has made that substantially more difficult. So, I won't judge a studio with limited resources if they use ai for this singular aspect of their otherwise completely human creation nearly as much as I would, say, Rockstar or EA or Activision. But there's also plenty of other ways to get a font, several people here have linked free options.

So, as far as I can tell, your arguments are that that a normal font is nothing more than the alphabet, therefore there's no art in it, and therefore the creator shouldn't have any claim to it. My argument is that every detail is an artistic choice, and that simply making it look aesthetically pleasing or distinctive is art. If fonts weren't art, why would people even bother with different looking fonts? But regardless of the art question, if the creator can't license their fonts, it would mean that they get no compensation for when some company uses their work.

>after they bought the rights to some font. Now That's What I Call Capitalism I'm already against the concept of "buying the rights" to anything, let alone buying the rights to something then *raising the cost to license it.* I would be burning fucking buildings down

You understood my arguments correctly. But I have since had my mind changed by mindbleach@sh.itjust.works so please forgive my ignorance.

So design a couple fonts. It ain't rocket science.

I'm guessing the problem is they want a relatively unique font to avoid looking the same as other games, and then once they've chosen their font they're pretty much stuck with it unless they're willing to change the look of their game (for live-service games at least). A number of the fonts there might work for new stuff though.

1) that's literally one of the most bigoted comments I've ever seen in the fediverse 2) your comment is in English, a language so non-functional it's the only one that had to have spelling bees to get kids to learn its asinine rules