Americans keen to watch a movie on DVD have in years past frequently been confronted with a compulsory anti-piracy ad equating the unlawful digital acquisition of a film to grand theft auto. Moviegoers occasionally had to sit through the same jarring ad in theaters. In an ironic twist, the iconic font flashed repeatedly at would-be pirates in dark rooms across the country may itself have been pirated.
The
ad, which has been parodied numerous times including by “The IT Crowd” TV series, was created by the Motion Picture Association of America in conjunction with Britain’s Federation Against Copyright Theft and the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore. It debuted in theaters around the world and on home entertainment in July 2004.
At the outset, it shows a teenage girl downloading a pirated film on a desktop computer. The ad then runs through a sequence of dramatized crimes broken up by white text on black background telling prospective digital pirates that they would not similarly engage in other forms of theft: “You wouldn’t steal a car”; “You wouldn’t seal a handbag”; “You wouldn’t steal a television”; “You wouldn’t steal a movie.”
Finally the ad states, “Downloading films is stealing — is against the law. Piracy. It’s a crime.”
The corresponding
print campaign, which used the same font, insinuated a link between “DVD piracy and serious crime,” highlighting cases where pirated DVDs were found in the possession of unsavory characters including an illegal alien and drug traffickers.
Bluesky user Rib
noted last week that the font used throughout the ad “was a pirated clone (XBAND Rough) of a real font (FF Confidential).”
‘The campaign has always had the wrong tone.’
Rib
explained that by using the font editing software FontForge on a PDF from the ad campaign’s website, he was able to confirm “they are indeed using the illegal clone version of the font, rather than the licensed one!”
Sky News subsequently
conducted its own investigation. After replicating the process, the network drew the same conclusion: The piracy ad’s font was pirated.
The British news site noted, however, that there was no evidence to suggest the campaign’s designers were aware that the font was pirated, adding that copies of the pirated font were widely circulated in the early 2000s.
Dutch type designer and software developer Just van Rossum told Sky News, “I had known about the ‘illegal clone’ of my font before, but I didn’t know that that was the one used in the campaign.”
Van Rossum confirmed to Melissa Lewis, a reporter at the Center for Investigative Reporting, that XBAND Rough “is indeed an ‘illegal clone’ of FF Confidential.”
“The campaign has always had the wrong tone, which (to me) explains the level of fun that has been had at its expense,” said van Rossum. “The irony of it having used a pirated font is just precious.”
Neither America’s Motion Picture Association nor the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore responded to Sky News’ requests for comments. The Federation Against Copyright Theft declined to comment, indicating the campaign predated anyone now working at the organization.
Van Rossum
told TorrentFreak that he has no intention of taking action, as he is no longer the font’s official distributor. The licensing is reportedly now handled by the American digital typesetting company Monotype.
This is not the first time an anti-piracy ad came off sounding like hypocrisy.
The Foundation for the Protection of the Rights of the Entertainment Industry of the Netherlands asked Dutch musician Melchior Rietveldt to compose music for
another anti-piracy video in 2006.
Wired
reported that the following year, Rietveldt discovered that his music was being used on a globally distributed “Harry Potter” DVD without his permission. His music had actually been used on at least 70 different commercial DVDs.
Years later, an Amsterdam court fined Rietvedlt’s music royalty collections agency, ordering the outfit to pay the musician the money owed him.
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