I’ve been reading about font copyright, especially in german law in order to get a better understanding of all the rights and protections applicable to the Standard and SiFoX Fonts in Signum for the Atari ST.
There seem to be four ways to look at it
- As a creative work of visual art, covered by the UrhG (copyright law). This has rarely, if ever, been recognized for any particular font, but would be the strongest protection with the longest duration (i.e. 70 years after the death of the creator)
- As part of the design of a physical product under the (design law DesignG). In this case, the font itself is not protected, but the overall design is.
- As a computer program. There seems to be a consensus that vector fonts or any kind of font program that consists of statements describing the drawing of the font is a computer program and protected as such. Importantly, this includes the right to limit what the output of the program is used for.
- As a font, e.g. according to the Vienna Agreement on the Protection of Type Faces. These generally involve a short protection period (at least 15 years), and are granted by a registration with the office associated with a hefty charge (CHF 500 for the first 75 characters then CHF 100 for each additional block of 10 characters).
The main challenge with treating fonts as visual copyright is that their reproduction (on a page, digital, paper or other surface) is intrinsic to their intended use case.