I remember trying to explain to some colleagues why I paid about 100 bucks for the font I use and why I wouldn’t share it with them and they just couldn’t get it.

(It’s Berkeley mono).

I don’t even know how many glyphs it is (it’s thousands) but for something I’m looking at for 6-8 hours a day, every single day and is the absolute peak of perfection (at least to me), 100 bucks seems like a fucking bargain to me.

shrug I guess these folks never sold something they made completely by themselves maybe.

I've made a couple of fonts. Very bad ones. I know firsthand they absolutely take creativity and tradecraft.

A well made font, from an artistic perspective, is a thing of beauty-- particularly when it incorporates subtle visual themes and nuances. It's definitely more than just "drawing the alphabet". There are also metric ass-tons of glyphs necessary to make a usable font.

Likewise, a properly hinted digital font file, especially with little touches like ligatures, is also a thing of utilitarian beauty. It's a ton of work to get that right.

That the shapes of fonts can't be protected by copyright isn't a new idea. Anybody who makes a font today should know that going in. I wouldn't make a font with the expectation of getting paid outside of doing it for a specific commission. Doing it "for the love" and expecting to get paid seems like a losing business proposition.

>What saddens me is that a lot of people are so ignorant that they don't even realize a font is something that takes creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort to design.

Except most of the creative part was done 100 years ago and companies are now trying to protect the fact that they digitized something that has existed for a century or longer.

It's not about ignorance. There are so many things you interact with every day that take "creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort" that it's impossible to be aware of the details of each one. At some point you just have to abstract that stuff away and go on with your day.

No kidding. As part of a mapping project I worked on, I created a set of 200+ custom SVG icons. I used Inkscape and hand-drew most of the shapes or modified existing glyphs from icon fonts or other raw vector graphic sources. This took months of work and planning, and I even figured out how to use Inkscape’s batch scripting API to automate some things. It was one of the most tedious things I’ve worked on and I am very proud of it. And as far as I know, it’s still in use today by the customer.

I think it is perhaps important to realise that while what you say is true, that is not what is protected by copyright. As others have said in these comments, if the font had been copied using the digital data then it may be a copyright infringement, but if the duplicate font had been constructed from scratch to be a visually identical font then it may not be a copyright infringement.

>> What saddens me is that a lot of people are so ignorant that they don't even realize a font is something that takes creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort to design.

I get that an average computer user who just views content might not. But as soon as you start creating stuff and even searching for and downloading a font you like I'd think some kind of mental bell would ring like "oh, these are a thing. Like some type of commodity."