In reply to Copying Metrics OK?:
Richard Fink has been promoting the idea that fonts are not really subject to copyright.
While I'm personally view open to his ideas on that, my understanding of those who say copyright in the USA does apply to font data is that its based on the Adobe vs SSI case, in which the placement of bezier points was held to be a copyrightable expression, since different people will place the points differently around the same shape, when digitizing an existing design that is scanned into the computer as a bitmap and traced by hand with a bezier tool.
Following that logic, I can see how the metrics would not be subject to copyright, because anyone would copy the metrics of the original in the same way.
However, that court case is years later than the classic Bitstream/URW/ScanGraphic/etc clone fonts.
The Liberation fonts aren't a good example, because even before the buyout Ascender had a close relationship with Monotype. Is there any other fonts made in the last 5 years that are well known to have cloned metrics?
