You Wouldn’t Steal a Font…

In the 2000s, the DVD industry was concerned about piracy, in particular the threat to their business model presented by counterfeit DVDs and downloadable movies. Their response was a campaign which could be found embedded into the intro sequences of many DVDs of the era, in which an edgy font on a black background began with “You wouldn’t steal a car.. “. It was enough of a part of the background noise of popular culture that it has become a meme in the 2020s, reaching many people with no idea of its origins. Now in a delicious twist of fate, it has been found that the font used in the campaign was itself pirated. Someone should report them.

The font in question is FF Confidential, designed by [Just van Rossum], whose brother [Guido] you may incidentally know as the originator of the Python programming language. The font in the campaign isn’t FF Confidential though, as it turns out it’s XBAND Rough, a pirated copy of the original. What a shame nobody noticed this two decades ago.

It’s a bit of fun to delight in an anti-piracy campaign being caught using a dodgy font, but if this story serves to tell us anything it’s that the web of modern intellectual property is so labyrinthine as to be almost impossible to navigate without coming a cropper somewhere. Sadly the people caught out in this case would be the last to call for reform of the intellectual property environment, but as any sane heads would surely agree, such reform is overdue.

If copyright gives you a headache, here’s our take on it.