Several posters to this group have mentioned or inquired about Hermann Zapf's recent resignation from ATypI (Association Typographique Internationale), the international typographic society that he helped found. His resignation is said to have been a protest against ATypI's lack of control of font piracy by its own member corporations. Along the same thread, some posters have asked whether designers like Zapf receive any royalties from font pirates.

I thought that readers of this group would prefer to hear from Zapf in his own words, rather than read more speculations, and so I asked him if he would contribute some remarks to comp.fonts. He granted me permission to post the essay which follows.

For those reader who may not know of Hermann Zapf, he is a world-famous calligrapher and the designer of Palatino, ITC Zapf Chancery, ITC Zapf Dingbats, Optima, Melior, and some 100 other typefaces. He is generally regarded as the greatest type designer of our time, and possibly of the 20th century. He is also the most plagiarized and pirated designer of our time.

At RIDT'94 in Darmstadt in April, he will speak about advances in computer typography, and also join in a round table discussion about font piracy and protection.

Here are his remarks.

HAS TYPE DESIGN ANY FUTURE?

Call for Foundation of a "Sir Francis Drake Society"

by Hermann Zapf (Copyright (c) 1994 by Hermann Zapf)

"Among people, there are more copies than originals." - Pablo Picasso

Author's note: "...the same applies to typefaces."

It's high time to establish a "Sir Francis Drake Society." A contemporary of Claude Garamond, Sir Francis Drake lived from 1540 to 1596. He already has many devoted followers and admirers in the graphics industry. Large software companies and type designers in the digital era will welcome Sir Francis Drake as their patron. In 1581 Queen Elizabeth knighted him for his achievements and later he was elected member o the Parliament.

Let's bring Sir Francis Drake's life back to the minds of those not familiar with his daring deeds. In the 16th century, Francis Drake was a relentless pirate who took hold of everything he desired. Aren't we - living in the 20th century - confronted with similar actions in the field of type design, owing to the fact that type designers in all countries suffer from a lack of copyright protection for their work and their property? There are a number of pirates raising the Jolly Roger everywhere, but when ashore they attend large-scale conferences where they claim to devote themselves to the colors of honorable shipping companies.

Something happened in September 1993 in the harbor city of Antwerp. The Association Typographique Internationale had a conference and talked about an "Anti-Piracy Campaign." Some firms had become angry about the illegal copies of their software, a loss of income of millions. Mac and PC users should buy only original software and no cheap copies. Such font software are alphabets, which means the creative work of type designers. These designers also feel originals should be sold, and no copies.

Recently, to the other existing copies of my Palatino sold under obscure names, a new poor copy was done, named "Book Antiqua" and sold to a giant software firm. They used their own copyright on the diskettes and under "All rights reserved." What rights are left to the originator? I had no information, no possibility to make corrections, and of course have received not a cent for royalties. Such big software companies should have the best Palatino for their customers and not a copy.

The firm producing this "Book Antiqua" was a speaker of the "Anti-Piracy Campaign." This caused me to resign in Antwerp as a founding member of ATypI after 36 years. This organization was established in 1957 by Charles Peignot to protect internationally the creative work of type designers and also of type founders. Great names had been connected with ATypI in its history - personalities like Beatrice Warde, Stanley Morison, Giovanni Mardersteig, Willem Ovink, Roger Excoffon, Georg Trump, etc.

Even in business there are some rules! You can't steal apples from your neighbor's orchard and sell them as your own product at the market to get money. Even if your neighbor has no fence around his property, it is not allowed, for we are living in a civilized country. Apples are apples and alphabets are alphabets is a simple answer. But we know there are all kinds of apples with different brands and there are also different typefaces - some with names like Palatino and Optima. The situation with typefaces is: They have no fence by copyright law.

Another example perhaps for the U.S. Copyright Office is this. A picture taken with a cheap camera by an amateur in 1/1000 of a second has at once the backing of the international copyright. But there may be in the future some new legal questions arise by taking from a TV set pictures for commercial use without permission, eventually to manipulate, or by cropping essential parts or changing details electronically. The newest electronic visual systems are producing pictures with a video-printer in seconds. These people don't think about what they are doing with images of a pretty blond or of a famous sports hero. Nobody would copy a record of Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story" and sell it under another copyright.

Nobody can make a reprint of a work of literature with a new title by changing the author's name. A typeface is sometimes the result of developments over years - e.g. Optima from 1952 to 1958 - and at the end is the creative work of a designer without any protection against copying.

But a logo done of a few letters of an existing alphabet has the backing of a trademark or copyright like "expo67" for the exhibition in Montreal in Optima. Or take the IBM logo - three letters of Georg Trump's typeface "City Bold." On the other hand, the complete alphabet has no international protection at all.

The manipulations of original drawings of artists will become more and more a common procedure, and some will wake up when such people discover that their own work was used or copied to fill the pockets of someone else.

Some contemporaries expect a type designer to work for nothing - as a crusader or pioneer in the battle against illiteracy - with all his simple heart in a social engagement - but at the end to feed big companies. In short: this is making profit with the intellectual property of others.

I doubt that lawyers are helping people in the sad situation of a poor man, out of a human feeling for him, working for nothing, paying out of their own pocket the expenses of employees and others.

But in the case of a type designer, it is all right to get not a nickel for distribution rights of a creative work.

Copyists have no risk in the manufacturing and promotion of a successful typeface. It is so easy under the existing laws to take creative artwork for nothing, without authorization, not mentioning the source. It looks to the user as he buys the developments that he is compensating the firm's investment of research and developing.

We have an inflation of alphabets in these days - a lot of new and fresh ideas but also many bad designs. Too many, you may say. But you can be sure the acceptance of some of these creations will be corrected by the market. As in the past, only the good design will stand. Many of this ephemera will soon be forgotten and, no question, nobody will copy these alphabets.

Type reflects trends and developments like any other artistic activity. They follow fashion streams. This is not so much in text faces, for our eyes are still the same as in Gutenberg's time. But in display type, the design must be attractive enough to catch the attention of the reader of an ad. Here is still an interesting field for new ideas.

Today less neutral or anonymous alphabets are wanted, but more individual interpretations, some with a pronounced personal hand. In addition, the computer is now entering the creative area - the absolute domain of a designer in the past. With a PC and the possibility of morphing, it is possible to get new solutions which never existed before. Such developments are welcomed and have many positive aspects - as long as they are not getting into the hands of the pseudo-designers.

The danger for the future is the endless possibility of manipulating existing alphabets and to sell them as one's own creations. In a few years we will have a complete bastardization. It will be hard to identify what is an original alphabet and what is a modified and miserable botch for the ordinary reader - and yes, even the so-called experts - who don't see the tiny little differences in the small reading sizes.

(Previously published as an editorial in Calligraphy Review, Vol. IX, No. 1, 1994, and in the Bulletin of the Typographers International Association, February, 1994.)

The United States enacted the Plant Patent Act in 1931, to allow plant breeders to protect new varieties of plants. The act provides protection for 17 years, as with utility patents, and covers apples as well as roses, etc. Historians of the U.S. agricultural and horticultural industry credit that act with helping establish the U.S. as the greatest center for innovative plant breeding in the world. Because of the protection of new varieties, individuals and firms can recoup the many years of investment needed to develop a new cultivar, and hence have the incentive to develop new strains of plants.

I will give an example from an area of horticulture that I know something about, rose breeding. There are some 200 wild species of roses, but more than 10,000 cultivars, based on hybrids of various species, and on hybrids of the hybrids. Commercial rose hybridizers estimate that the breeding of a new, commercial variety of rose takes about 10 years and $100,000 dollars. Without protection of cultivars, the rose breeders would not be able to recoup such investments, because roses can be easily "cloned".

Let me give a specific example. The rose known in America as 'Peace' is a variety of hybrid tea, a hybrid of various other hybrids, descending ultimately from an ancient European rose cultivar probably known the the Greeks and Romans, an ancient Persian yellow rose cultivar, and an old Mandarin cultivar or two. The particular cross that gave rise to 'Peace' was made in the 1930's by a young, enthusiastic Frenchman named Francis Meilland, who was himself the son of a rose grower and who had learned rose hybridizing from a successful amateur-turned-professional hybridizer, Charles Mallerin, who generously taught the young Meilland the techniques and the love of the "art" of rose breeding.

The rose that was to become 'Peace' was grown and tesed for several years in Meilland's growing field in Lyon France, and then sent out to trusted associates in other countries for further testing. I say "trusted" because in Europe there was no protection for cultivated plant varieties. A rose breeder made very little money from new varieties in those days, because as soon as a variety became popular, it was promptly cloned by opportunistic growers. And here, "clone" is really the right word. Because roses are complex hybrids, they do not breed true from seed. The same is true of many other plant varieties, including apple cultivars. Hence, the only way to reproduce a particular variety is by cloning - asexual reproduction that exactly copies the genetic code. The usual techniques are grafting and budding. That's one of the reasons that most varieties of fruit trees are grafted, a "scion" being attached to a "rootstock" (other reasons are to have a rootstock adapted to a particular soil, or with a particular disease resistance, or with "dwarfing" characteristics, etc.).

Just before France fell to the invading German armies at the beginning of WWII, Francis Meilland sent out a few more cuttings of his experimental rose to his friend and business associate Robert Pyle, an aggresive but honest Quaker who headed the Conard-Pyle rose firm in Pennsylvania. Pyle arranged that the rose cuttings be shipped out of Lyon in a diplomatic pouch on the last plane leaving Lyon before the arrival of the Germans.

Back in Pennsylvania, Pyle cloned the cuttings and figured that this rose was a winner. He tested it further during the war years, and then geared up for large scale propagation in 1945, and "introduced" the new rose at a press conference the day that Berlin fell to the allied armies. Pyle named the rose 'Peace', and arranged that every delegate to the first United Nations conference in SF that year received one of the roses. 'Peace' became a tremendous hit, with hundreds of millions of plants sold world-wide since its introduction.

Oh yeah, and Robert Pyle *patented* the rose under U.S. patent law. And then, he sent the royalties to Francis Meilland. Francis did three things with the money: he went into rose breeding full time and produced many more excellent roses; he raised a family of rose hybridizers who have successfully carried on the business after his death, raising many more excellent roses (I get their catalog from France every year, and grow several of their roses); he campaigned tirelessly for patent protection of rose varieties in Europe. Of course, he met strident opposition from many opportunistic growers who preferred to clone his new rose varieties for free, without paying royalties, but eventually he was victorious in France and other European countries. His efforts for plant protection eventually helped many other competing rose hybridizers, such as the McGredy family in Northern Ireland and New Zealand, the Harkness family in England, David Austin in England, the Kordes and Tantau families in Germany, the Delbards in France, and so on.

All in all, U.S. protection of new plant varieties has been a great boon to the world of roses, helping not only U.S. hybridizers but, by example, and by royalties paid to European hybridizers for varieties marketed in the U.S., hybridizers in Europe, Japan, New Zealand, and elsewhere in the world.

Of course, opportunistic growers who prefer to clone without paying still don't like plant patent, but in fact they don't have much to complain about. Plant patents expire after 17 years. Of the 10,000 or so known rose cultivars, some 9,000 or more are now in the public domain, so growers who don't want to pay royalties are free to clone any of the PD varieties, many of which are still popular and profitable to grow commercially, and many of which are beautiful and enjoyable, whether or not they are profitable. There are dozens of small rose growers, mom 'n' pop cottage growers, who cater to the specialist market, and there are also giant agribusiness rose growers. Indeed, among rose connoisseurs, they call themselves "rosarians", there is a whole cohort who strongly prefer the older roses and the species roses, which can be propagated without bothering about patent law. Hence, patent has not prevented the appreciation and propagation of most roses, and especially not of the older roses much beloved by many, and does not prevent a wide range of small, medium, and large rose-growing businesses. It only protects, for a short time, the new cultivars in which hybridizers have invested many thousands of dollars of research and development costs.

So, Zapf's analogy of apples wasn't too far off the mark after all.

-- Chuck Bigelow