Owning literal letters has got to be the dumbest shit I've heard in my life. Fucking leeches.
this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
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I remember back during the NFT hype cycle how people were claiming they'd patented particular shades of color and were selling rights to them on the blockchain.
I gotta wonder who even enforces this shit. Where do you go to register a font-type you claim you own that looks shockingly similar to a font people have been using since the printing press was invented? So much of this just feels like vexatious litigation. "Ah, yes, that's actually my 'a' and you need to pay me $20k to use it".
It really is fucking obnoxious. I do understand in some instances where there's some really cool font an ARTIST made but this obviously not the case. Just some snivelling pencil pushers that found a way to game the system and fuck people over.
They own a font, which is a way of writing the letters. Wondering though, how many Japanese fonts are there?
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Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
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Monotype may as well be the mafia. My wife's work had to deal with those assholes, too, after they bought the rights to some font. They're just shaking companies down for cash.
after they bought the rights to some font.
Now That's What I Call Capitalism
I would be burning fucking buildings down. I'd be at the top of the FBI's most wanted list.
This would be an interesting comic strip. A company that has purchased all the fonts in existence, and then the artist doing the comic you are reading gets sued by the company he’s making a comic about, because he doesn’t have the rights to the font.
Put up or shut up
There was a fun article yesterday about a guy dealing with the Monotype shakedown.
I can't figure out how to strip this weird Voyager url handler to the Lemmy post, so here's the actual post
https://www.insanityworks.org/randomtangent/2025/11/14/monotype-font-licencing-shake-down
Excellent time for Japanese devs to collectively develop some open-source fonts. Many hands make light work.
open-source fonts
Don't they already exist? Work already done makes no work needed.
Evidently game devs have some distinct expectations, or they could already use those and save some money.
This could be a rallying point for professional artists to build a font family conveying whimsy, authority, fantasy, antiquity, futurism, etc. Like how DejaVu covers a little bit of everything.
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It’s also worth noting that in the case of games in Japanese, it’s not so easy for developers to find alternatives. While games using English can rely on system UI fonts, cheap commercial fonts or open-source options, the sheer number of characters used in Japanese means high-quality fonts are extremely difficult and expensive to make, so few affordable alternatives are available.
There's already a decent selection of high quality, freely available Japanese fonts here: https://fonts.google.com/?lang=ja_Jpan
Free for commercial use?
Yeah:
Yes, you can use them commercially, and even include them within a product that is sold commercially. Usage and redistribution conditions are specified in the license. The most common license is the SIL Open Font License. Some fonts are under the Apache license or Ubuntu Font License. You can redistribute open source fonts according to those conditions.
https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#can_i_use_any_font_in_a_commercial_product
I'm guessing the problem is they want a relatively unique font to avoid looking the same as other games, and then once they've chosen their font they're pretty much stuck with it unless they're willing to change the look of their game (for live-service games at least). A number of the fonts there might work for new stuff though.
The worst rent seekers come for everything
"Font" and "licensing" are not words that belong together.
"Oh, I took the alphabet and made it slightly different - you know, like every single person who ever learned how to write - only I did it on a computer so now you have to pay me forever if you want your computer to write like mine does".
It's artwork, like any other visual element in a game.
The problem is price-gouging. Japan should set national maximum rates. You drew every fucking kanji in a cool new style? Great, here's some money. Emphasis on some.
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Can't they just switch to something else?
I’m sure they will over time, but I would guess there’s a surprising number of potential issues with any font variance. That’s the kind of thing that can appear hardware-dependently, like certain high/low-res monitors showing fonts too big, too small, or even not at all. So any bug fixes that have come through on the subject will rely on user bug reports.
If it was as simple as the font swapping feature seen in Word, I’m sure it wouldn’t be a big deal.
Warn people the update changes fonts then, it's not like you have to force everyone to update immediately
Then use a free OFL-licensed font. Or cooperate to commission your own fonts to share among this consortium.
Really a non-issue if you're not stupid.
So design a couple fonts. It ain't rocket science.
Japanese fonts are much harder to make than English fonts. Thousands of characters and all that.
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Kanji has over two thousand typical characters. Feel free to contribute several to open-source fonts.
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