united-states copyright
Can a typeface always distributed in digital form be recreated by hand?
<p>Typefaces are <em>not</em> protected by copyright, fonts (the implementation) are.</p>
<p>Does this mean that a typeface always distributed in digital format (mostly recent typefaces from the 2000s and beyond) can be recreated by hand, without copying the <em>actual positions of the control points used to form a character</em>? (I throught that this lack of protection only applied to pre-digital typefaces).</p>

<p>Typefaces are not protected by copyright. If you extract the typeface from the font file, e.g. by printing it, it is now just a typeface, and thus not protected.</p>
<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160304054053/http://www.copyright.gov/history/mls/ML-393.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://web.archive.org/web/20160304054053/http://www.copyright.gov/history/mls/ML-393.pdf</a> is a decision of the Copyright Office in 1988 that concludes &quot;if copyright protection for the master computer program alone is not adequate to encourage creativity in the field of computer-assisted typeface design, any broader protection, if appropriate, should be legislated by Congress rather than established by administrative decision makers.&quot; Congress has not made any changes to the appropriate parts of the law since then, so it still holds; copyright protects the master computer program only.</p>
