Monotype loses copyright claim

Out-Law.com reports that it alleged breaches of its copyrights, its trademark rights and also the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Monotype and its subsidiary International Typeface Corporation filed their lawsuit in the Northern District of Illinois in June 2003 over rival font developer Bitstream’s software called TrueDoc. Monotype\'s roots date back to the Nineteenth Century. It was Monotype that designed Times New Roman, on a commission from The Times newspaper in 1931. It was another commission from Microsoft that led Monotype to design Arial, a typeface that originally served as a cheaper substitute for Helvetica, designed by rival font designer Linotype. Today, Monotype and ITC license around 1 900 fonts to designers, developers, printer makers and others. Bitstream has been specialising in digital fonts since launching in 1981. Its best-known font is Swiss 721 BT, another Helvetica clone; but it licenses over 1 000 others. The judge ruled that Monotype and ITC had not put forward sufficient evidence to show that users of the software had actually used it in breach of copyright or trademark rights. Nor had they shown that Bitstream knew that TrueDoc was being used in breach of its rights. Full Out-Law.com report

Because file-sharing networks continue to house illegal files they should be shut down, CNET News quotes a California senator as saying. Intellectual property protection ‘can\'t function in a country where the high-tech services become such that you can\'t protect copyright,’ said Senator Dianne Feinstein, at a US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. The session centered on the landmark Supreme Court decision on MGM v Grokster, which ruled that file-sharing services can be liable for their users\' infringing behaviour. Pointing to what she called a ‘rise in peer to peers’ since the Grokster decision, Feinstein said current law is not effective enough to deter illegal file swapping and the government must enact stronger enforcement measures. ‘If we don\'t stop it,’ she said, ‘it\'s going to destroy these intellectual property industries.’ Full CNET News report