Keeping things business as usual, LetterHead Fonts was nice enough to post about the subsequent bittorent of the their LHF Garner, a classic sign font akin to the Larabie Blue Highway, or the exquisite Hoefler & Frere-Jones, Gotham.
Long story short: apparently Randy Howe purchased the type in June, 2007 and sent the font to a design firm farming work for him, which violated his agreement with LHF. Said design firm has an employee who decided to bittorent the font to the world, violating just about every digital purchase agreement that isn’t CC (and some that are). LHF asked Randy to cough up the culprit, Randy refuses and LHF has chosen to publish this nice notation.
Rock and a hard place for me; I’m annoyed on a few biased fronts that I’ll embellish. Randy probably shouldn’t have sent the font – though I have done this for my own design team on occasion and have helped out clutch production teams when it’s needed – I go out of my way to pay my share. Each situation is different, a black and white opinion of this scenario isn’t justifiable, and although I’m sure we can debate it, as adults we can see both ends.
LHF wants to understandably know who was the culprit that uploaded the font: but I wouldn’t feel the need to snitch either, and that is equally as debatable in the gray opinions of the world.
I sure wouldn’t want to call BS on Randy in a long winded email complete with charts, but that’s because I’d think I’d look pompous and out of touch with the industry concern on both sides. Nevertheless, if it was my business, I’d probably take the same route of publication.
I don’t agree, but I don’t disagree, and that’s the fundamental confusion I’m sure for both sides: as a once rogue libertarian, the argument of property loss isn’t, well, lost on me. The question I have is the value of calling it out on my person versus the value of that font… maybe in the end, I just would have wrote that article in a tone less attacking the world and more attacking the problem.