How the tables have turned. The infamous campaign against illegally downloading movies and music appears to have spelled out its warnings in an illegally cloned typeface, Sky News confirmed this week after an investigative reporter took notice on Bluesky.
The “You Wouldn’t Steal a Car” PSA from the Motion Picture Association of America (now known as the Motion Picture Association) is getting mocked all over again, more than 20 years after it started popping up at movie theaters and on DVDs.
- The commercial was believed to feature a typeface called FF Confidential, which you may recognize from the end of the Scream movies. It was released in 1992 by Just van Rossum (whose brother created the coding language Python).
- But the font file used in the anti-piracy campaign’s website materials was actually a free copycat of FF Confidential made in 1996, so the organization could’ve also used the knockoff typeface in its video PSA.
“I find it hilarious,” van Rossum told the blog TorrentFreak, saying he always thought the anti-piracy campaign had licensed his font. It’s possible that the MPAA didn’t realize it was using a knockoff because of the phony font’s popularity at the time, per Sky News. The association declined the outlet’s request for comment.
What now? Likely not much. Typefaces fall into a messy area of intellectual property law and generally lack copyright protection. The creator of the font used by Shake Shack lost a legal battle over the burger chain’s logo last year.—ML
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