At 16:01 3/12/2002, John Cowan wrote:
> > Would it even be *legal* to
> > include those characters (referring to U+00A9 COPYRIGHT SIGN)?
>
>Characters are abstractions, and glyphs are not subject to copyright
>protection. I am not a lawyer; this is not legal advice.
I suppose the question is whether the Tengwar and Cirth scripts can be
considered literary inventions within the copyright of the Tolkien estate.
I suspect the estate could make a case, if they felt inclined to do so. I
am also not a lawyer, and it is not any kind of advice.
By the way, alphanumeric outline format glyphs are not subject to copyright
protection in the USA, but are in some other jurisdictions.
Non-alphanumeric glyphs, particularly ornaments and other non-semantic
glyphs, may be subject to copyright as works of art in the USA. Bitmap
alphanumeric glyphs are not subject to copyright anywhere, to my knowledge,
but bitmap icons are. The US Copyright Office doesn't know type design from
a hole in the ground, insofar as they consider it the intellectual property
equivalent of digging a ditch. The US Patent and Trademark Office grants
design patent protection to glyph designs if they demonstrate significant
distinctiveness and originality according to the review criteria.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
... es ist ein unwiederbringliches Bild der Vergangenheit,
das mit jeder Gegenwart zu verschwinden droht, die sich
nicht in ihm gemeint erkannte.
... every image of the past that is not recognized by the
present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear
irretrievably.
Walter Benjamin
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