HEATHER TAL MURPHY, Slate; Into the Sparkly Heart of Zazzle’s Font War
"In filings pushing to dismiss the suit, Zazzle blasted back that a font cannot be protected by copyright in the United States. Multiple lawyers verified this. Indeed, from a copyright standpoint, it’s irrelevant how beloved a font is, says Tyler Ochoa, a professor specializing in copyright law at Santa Clara University’s School of Law...
But here is where the case relates to the emerging debate around artificial intelligence. Laatz also argues that the company stole the Blooming Elegant Trio font software. Whenever we select a font, whether in Google Docs or Instagram stories, the application is relying on software to indicate not only what each letter looks like, but how those letters should relate to one another. Many designers draw each letter in a font-making tool and then allow that tool to generate the software for them, said Stacy Terry, a font designer in New Orleans. Still, as easy as that may sound, it took Terry six months of fine-tuning to create her first font.
“The output of an A.I. is not copyrightable,” said Mr. Ochoa, unless human creativity is combined with AI. Similarly here, you can protect font software by copyright, he said, but only if more than a minimal amount of human creativity, such as coding, played a role in producing it. So how do you define human creativity?
The answer, in this case, highlights the stark difference between the way the law and fellow creatives dole out credit to the imagination. Proving that Laatz played a key role will likely come down to proving that she wrote code by hand, said Christopher Sprigman, a professor at NYU Law and author of the book The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation. He points to an exchange that Zazzle lawyers included between Laatz and the United States Copyright Office in their motion to dismiss the case. The examiner asked her to clarify whether the program was “hand-coded by a human author,” because it could not be registered if it was generated by a font program. Laatz says she hand-coded the designs and instructions in the font data, but Zazzle’s lawyer cast doubt on this."
