Intellectual property protection of typefaces

Typefaces, fonts, and their glyphs raise intellectual property considerations in copyright, trademark, design patent, and related laws. The copyright status of a typeface and of any font file that describes it digitally varies between jurisdictions. In the United States, the shapes of typefaces are not eligible for copyright but may be protected by design patent (although it is rarely applied for, the first US design patent that was ever awarded was for a typeface). Typefaces can be protected in other countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, and France, by industrial design protections that are similar to copyright or design patent in that they protect the abstract shapes. Additionally, in the US and some other countries, computer fonts, the digital instantiation of the shapes as vector outlines, may be protected by copyright on the computer code that produces them. The name of a typeface may also be protected as a trademark.

Copyright

Germany

In 1981, West Germany passed the Gesetz zum Wiener Abkommen vom 12. Juni 1973 über den Schutz typographischer Schriftzeichen und ihre internationale Hinterlegung ("Law on the 1973 Vienna Agreement for the Protection of Type Faces and their International Deposit", also simply known as Schriftzeichengesetz or "Type Faces Law"), according to which a typeface is initially protected under German copyright law for 10 years from first publication onwards. After the end of the initial ten-year period, the rights holder may pay a fee to prolong copyright status for one additional 15 years period. According to German law, every typeface thus ends up in the public domain after no more than 25 years from first publication onwards, when it is also free to be digitized into a computer font, which in itself holds a much higher copyright protection status by German law than analogue typefaces because it is legally classified as a computer program.