It's artwork, like any other visual element in a game. The problem is price-gouging. Japan should set national maximum rates. You drew every fucking kanji in a cool new style? Great, here's some money. Emphasis on some.

So the bar has shifted from "it's okay to replace dish-washers and others such staff with robots, as long as *artist* jobs are protected" to "well, okay, you can replace *certain kinds* of artist with robots." Which kind of artist is next in line?

Calling every use slop is like calling all e-mail spam.

Excellent time for Japanese devs to collectively develop some open-source fonts. Many hands make light work.

I mean, it's not the fault of the artists, and I don't really think this is meant to hurt them at all. They wanted to pay for the work of artists, but I also think it's unreasonable to expect game studios to spend 50 times more than they were before, for, forgive me if I'm wrong, a worse product. Ai is obviously not preferable, and it's not what I'd choose in this scenario, but it's also better than feeding Monotype's greed.

Right, it's okay if you're saving a lot of money in the process.

Its more likely they increased the price and immediately starting shaking down anyone who was paying for the old license price. Its a frustrating scummy tech company "strategy" that unfortunately works because someone at a developer or publisher will be willing to pay the hike if it means avoiding any legal battle.

Then use [a free OFL-licensed font](https://fontmeme.com/fonts/japanese-fonts-collection/). Or cooperate to commission your own fonts to share among this consortium. Really a non-issue if you're not stupid.

> Generative works cannot be copyrighted While that is generally true, a derivative work of a copyrighted work is usually copyrighted by the original author. That it what makes generative AI so risky. A court could order "This is a automated modification of work XY, thereby the full copyright lies with the author of work XY."

Sorry, you think that they're suddenly going to be paying artists 50 times more as well? No, their pay is probably going to stay right where it is. Monotype executives however, are probably going to be expecting some nice bonuses. This is all assuming that Monotype pays the font artists based on how much their font sells, and not a flat rate to simply create one as a contractor of some kind. I wouldn't know, I know very little about fonts and Monotype. Best thing that studios could do is probably commission their own font artists for a more reasonable amount to create a font for them. I guess that also depends on how much time and effort it takes artists to create a font, and how much they charge. Depending on the price, that may also be difficult to do for a smaller studio. This could all have been prevented if writing kanji in slightly different ways wasn't something that could be copyrighted, or if Monotype hadn't raised prices so much.

Man, shit is so fucked up. I wonder how bad things in general will have to be until something might get done about it.

Excellent time for the Japanese to drop ideogram/logogram system and have an alphabet like a functional language.

It's *debatably* artwork. Every single person has their own handwritten "font" - more than one if you write cursive and block letters. A font doesn't have a message or a meaning, it is just a means for conveying information through text. I'm sure you can produce several examples of specific fonts that qualify as "artwork" (though it's just a numbers game since there are literally hundreds of thousands of different fonts on the web, if not more) but that doesn't prove that every font is automatically "artwork". We could also make the claim that every drawing is an artwork depending on how we define the word, but that doesn't mean that every nine-year-old who draws an "original character" that's just a green Sonic the Hedgehog should be able to use the legal system to bully other people because he's an "artist".

Lol font licensing, I will now copyright the letter "E" in all its forms.

Why? And what constitutes a "functional language" to you? Is the fact that they can read, write, speak, and understand the language not "functional" enough for you? The point gets across to the person receiving the message. You can even translate it to a "functional language" of your choice, with some restrictions. Translation restrictions aren't isolated to Japanese either, there's lots of languages that have things which don't translate well, or at all, to English.

Free fonts exist, so you don't even need to resort to AI.

> Sorry, you think that they're suddenly going to be paying artists 50 times more as well? You've already established that it's okay to switch to AI to save money, we're now just dickering about the specific price. You were the one who introduced the 50-times threshold, I'm not concerned about being so specific. > I guess that also depends on how much time and effort it takes artists to create a font, and how much they charge. Depending on the price, that may also be difficult to do for a smaller studio. Indeed, AI tends to be more economically beneficial for smaller studios. It's one of the things I like about it.

Font and alphabet are not the same thing. Obviously nobody can or should own the letter E, but you pretend that the font creator's work adds nothing to that.  Someone had to do the work to make it look nice, beyond just being an E.

It's absogoddamnlutely artwork. As much as the game itself, as mere software, is artwork. Someone put a ton of tedious work into every font you consider boring. Typography is a whole field of study, balancing aesthetic and practical concerns, and you want to roll your eyes and insist that only Wingdings is *real* art. > We could also make the claim that every drawing is an artwork *Yes.* These aren't scribbled alphabets - which by the way are really fucking hard to do, when every copy of a letter has to look the same and still *feel* handwritten. These are letterforms conveying a particular tone, in use by industry professionals, for *three thousand characters.* Japanese has like three and a half alphabets to start with, and then Kanji is a whole mess of stolen Chinese ideograms. And they're fucking complicated. If you think you can bang that out with the effort of a child's crayon doodle, to the quality necessary for commercial video game projects, I invite you to try. Apparently it'd come in handy.

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.