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Owning literal letters has got to be the dumbest shit I've heard in my life. Fucking leeches.
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?
They don't own "literal letters."
They just own the token which represents the ownership of the literal letters.
oh fuck kill me the day we're gonna have to buy letter nfts instead of fonts
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
Admittedly I'm not sure if it works for Japanese, but English has online tools you can use to print out a sheet to write out every character and scan to turn into a font file. Would be surprising if it didn't exist for Japanese.
So ultimately you probably just need someone with neat handwriting.
Someone with neat handwriting, a few hours to burn, and lots of patience
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.
Lol font licensing, I will now copyright the letter "E" in all its forms.
I don't think that a single product whose price has multiplied by 50 times at once has ever been successful. Shit, even small price increases on streaming services over time cause people to resort to privacy (as we all should). 50 times at once is fucking insane. I don't think that any reasonable developer will actually be buying this shit, because there's always better alternatives available. This is fucking stupid.
Insulin in the US?
Unfortunately, people need that to live.
Its more likely they increased the price and immediately starting shaking down anyone who was paying for the old license price. Its a frustrating scummy tech company "strategy" that unfortunately works because someone at a developer or publisher will be willing to pay the hike if it means avoiding any legal battle.
Man, shit is so fucked up. I wonder how bad things in general will have to be until something might get done about it.
The thing is, they only need to successfully extort 3% of the font users to make a profit that way. And especially in text heavy games, it's not easy to just quickly switch out a font without formatting/visual issues
Not a fan of generative works, but this seems like a clear place to use it to fuck shit up.
Nih.hira.term.aigen.ttf Nih.katak.term.aigen.ttf Nih.kanji1.term.aigen.ttf Nih.kanji2.term.aigen.ttf Etc
Not the fault of the prompter if the resulting fonts appear to resemble licensed fonts, which are often slightly different copies of each other anyway.
Generative works cannot be copyrighted, so it would forever be in the public domain.
The only drawback would be that you would have to announce that you used slop in your game.
So the bar has shifted from "it's okay to replace dish-washers and others such staff with robots, as long as artist jobs are protected" to "well, okay, you can replace certain kinds of artist with robots."
Which kind of artist is next in line?
I will gladly replace dishwashers with dishwashing machines if they are energy, water, and cost-efficient, but I don't believe we are discussing artisan dishwashing. This borderline association approaches sophistry, so I think it is much better to discuss the use of art and the corporate hoarding of artwork.
Monotype does seem to pay font creators well for royalties.. My frustration is the aggressive pricing models, the growth of monotype to where they own the whole market (per tfa), and the way they are demanding payment for fonts without checking to see if there is an existing license..
Basically, I will encourage and pay for fair business practices. Squeezing people for cash pisses me off. I'm not knowledgeable enough to pretend to create a free font set in this manner, but I would advocate creating tools that would fuck up the market. Open fonts would be great, but again tfa says that it's too complicated of a data set for that, and the market is too small for independent artists.
Lastly, my answer wasn't a valid solution. There are plenty of legal and social hurdles to it.
I mean, it's not the fault of the artists, and I don't really think this is meant to hurt them at all. They wanted to pay for the work of artists, but I also think it's unreasonable to expect game studios to spend 50 times more than they were before, for, forgive me if I'm wrong, a worse product. Ai is obviously not preferable, and it's not what I'd choose in this scenario, but it's also better than feeding Monotype's greed.
Right, it's okay if you're saving a lot of money in the process.
Sorry, you think that they're suddenly going to be paying artists 50 times more as well? No, their pay is probably going to stay right where it is. Monotype executives however, are probably going to be expecting some nice bonuses. This is all assuming that Monotype pays the font artists based on how much their font sells, and not a flat rate to simply create one as a contractor of some kind. I wouldn't know, I know very little about fonts and Monotype. Best thing that studios could do is probably commission their own font artists for a more reasonable amount to create a font for them. I guess that also depends on how much time and effort it takes artists to create a font, and how much they charge. Depending on the price, that may also be difficult to do for a smaller studio. This could all have been prevented if writing kanji in slightly different ways wasn't something that could be copyrighted, or if Monotype hadn't raised prices so much.
Sorry, you think that they're suddenly going to be paying artists 50 times more as well?
You've already established that it's okay to switch to AI to save money, we're now just dickering about the specific price. You were the one who introduced the 50-times threshold, I'm not concerned about being so specific.
I guess that also depends on how much time and effort it takes artists to create a font, and how much they charge. Depending on the price, that may also be difficult to do for a smaller studio.
Indeed, AI tends to be more economically beneficial for smaller studios. It's one of the things I like about it.
I don't think it's okay, but I also won't judge people with limited resources for using it for things that they realistically can't afford. I believe that humans should design every single aspect of any video game. Monotype has made that substantially more difficult. So, I won't judge a studio with limited resources if they use ai for this singular aspect of their otherwise completely human creation nearly as much as I would, say, Rockstar or EA or Activision. But there's also plenty of other ways to get a font, several people here have linked free options.
Generative works cannot be copyrighted
While that is generally true, a derivative work of a copyrighted work is usually copyrighted by the original author (see remixes of music where the remixer only partially owns a copyright for the remix but the original artist does as well). That is what makes generative AI so risky. A court could order "This is a automated modification of work XY, thereby the full copyright lies with the author of work XY."
I was considering how copyrighted material can still be generated after writing that, so fair. If you fed in work a and made the same modification to each piece then it would just be a modified work a and not actually new work b.
Free fonts exist, so you don't even need to resort to AI.
I hear you, and that was my first thought reading through the article.
According to TFA:
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. This is what made LETS an important service, but its revamped pricing and limitations have now put it beyond the reach of a good chunk of developers.
Maybe there are alternatives out there, and I think a crowd sourced open font would be a great idea. I personally have no idea how to go about organizing a project of that scope.
Also, tbf, my answer was more emotional bitching than a serious take.
this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
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