There’s an infamous anti-piracy advertisement from back in 2004 that online oldsters will immediately recognize: “You wouldn’t steal a car,” it begins, complete with shakycam footage of some sketchy looking dude popping a lock, before rolling into various other types of theft and eventually equating it all with downloading a copy of Shrek 2. The ad makes it dramatically clear: Stealing Shrek will get you hard time in the slam when you’re inevitably busted for your criminal ways.
It was, and is, overwrought and silly, and so of course it inspired numerous parodies and memes: The British comedy series The IT Crowd did a particularly good one a few years after the original aired—in fact the old URL, piracyisacrime.com, now directs to The IT Crowd Clip on YouTube. I urge you to watch it. The ad itself was only around for a short time, but “you wouldn’t download a car” has endured in shitpost form for decades; it’s practically embedded in the fabric of the internet at this point.
But as good as many of these parodies are, none are as ridiculous (and funny) as the recent discovery that the world’s best-known anti-piracy ad may have used a pirated font.
The distinctive font used in the ad appears to be FF Confidential, created by Just van Rossum in 1992. But there’s another font called XBand Rough that’s virtually identical, and when journalist Melissa Lewis reached out to van Rossum about it, he told her XBand Rough is an “illegal clone” of FF Confidential.
This is where it gets interesting. After all this, another Bluesky user named Rib used the FontForge tool on a PDF file from the old anti-piracy campaign, available via the Wayback Machine, and discovered the file in question uses the XBand Rough font—the clone.
I love our spiderman meme culture where everyone is pointing their fingers at each other accusing them of stealing their idea/song/art/etc.
I can never understand how people carry so much water for corporations who could care less about them. We are supposed to rearrange our entire society around their revenue streams.
yeah. it’s mind blowing to me how the Internet was convinced to give up its a culture of piracy and privateering and become sycophants for corporate protection of IP under they imaginary impression that they are “protecting artists”.
There were industry executives and think tanks litterally quoted (in the 2000s) for saying that their job was to effectively convince people that piracy “hurt the artist”, that this was the way to stop piracy: convince people they were hurting artists by piracy.
Turns out, almost no artists except the most extraordinarily successful make any money off copyright or IP. They mostly make their money the way they’ve always made their money: ticket sales, merch sales, performances, etc.
Yo, that is my sequence of 0’s and 1’s is how ridiculous it all is in the digital era. Not to mention I have to pay for and maintain the hardware to even access the content.
I also have a hard time understanding the self imposed artificial scarcity we live with. Copying work/art/ideas/science is literally the point of humanity. We are truly living in a perverse time where corporations steal our culture and spoon feed it back to us for profit and control.
You should watch this from the “don’t be evil days” days of google.: https://youtu.be/mhBpI13dxkI
Copyright isn’t, and never has been, about “protecting the artist”.
It was, and is, and has always been, about controlling the means of distribution.
Interestingly, if you look into the lecturerer of that video, they are very active on mastadon.
Watching it now, I am pretty sure I know most the history but there is always more to learn. Thanks!