I'll admit first and foremost that I joined this site to get help finding some random font from a game. I'm working on a mod project for the game and needed to reproduce a style seen in it. However, this forum is one of the cleanest I've seen in a long time, and I'd love to engage further with the typography community. I'd like to start by asking another, broader question that's been throwing me off in my search for fonts for this game.

Why (and how, legally) are there seemingly four or five different versions of Compacta? Who is the owner of the original (I'm guessing ITC but I am unsure), and why are other foundries allowed to produce their own, barely changed versions? Monotype has Compacta MT, Scangraphic has Compacta SH and Compacta SB, and the version I've been using in my private tests until I'm ready to use for actual media is Compacta BT, which I can't even find a proper source for. I assume it's BitStream because that seems to be their signature, but I don't know. Is this not pretty grand copyright infringement from massive foundries? If this is all licensed and legal, why would these foundries pay what I would assume is a large amount of money to produce a font so effectively similar to the original that there's no way they make their money back?

Like, can I just make Compacta BJ (Compacta Bobby Joe) and change nothing except the badly assigned glyphs, and just sell it? Very confused.

In general, it’s complicated. I hope someone could point you towards a concise overview. In the meantime, there’s a brief video about the history of Compacta (via Fonts in Use).

I am not a lawyer so the following is NOT legal advice!

Outside the US there is protection for fonts, but in the US there is NO copyright on typeface designs. There is a Design Patent that can be applied for but it is too expensive for all but large companies, plus it doesn't last that long.

The actual underlying digital code in a font (the outlines) is copyrightable in the US so anyone who wants to produce their own version of a design has to do their own digitizing of it instead of copying outlines from another font.

On 2/24/2025 at 9:19 PM, YoYoBobbyJoe said:

I just make Compacta BJ

The name can be trademarked (which is different from copyrighted).

On 2/24/2025 at 9:19 PM, YoYoBobbyJoe said:

Like, can I just make Compacta BJ (Compacta Bobby Joe) and change nothing except the badly assigned glyphs, and just sell it? Very confused.

As a rule of thumb, you can't just rip off other people's designs, but typefaces that are so old that the creator has been dead for 70+ years are generally "open for interpretation". Hence the abundance of Garamond inspired variants on the market and also condensed advertising/headline fonts like Bebas just to name a couple. As long as you do all the digitising yourself, you would probably be in the clear as long as the copyright rules are honoured. Then there's open source/free domain fonts like Montserrat, where the license clearly states that you are allowed to make derivatives as long as you comply with the restrictions stated in the license. Argentum Sans is an example of that. When it comes to Compacta, it was designed in 1963 by Fred Lambert, so even if he had died that year (which he didn't) it would still be less than 70 years ago (62). You could probably legally create a Compacta inspired typeface from scratch, but just copying the outlines would definitely violate his copyright, and then there's other possible protections that you'd need to dig into. As Riccardo said, it's complicated.

For the record, none of this should be considered legal advice either.

8 hours ago, Bjørn Edvard Torbo said:

but typefaces that are so old that the creator has been dead for 70+ years are generally "open for interpretation".

But, surely someone owns the font still? Like, a family member or a corporation owns the copyright and publishing capabilities of the original font? Because I feel like these big foundries making pretty clear copies of the original without changing much at all would violate some kind of copyright law.

34 minutes ago, YoYoBobbyJoe said:

Because I feel like these big foundries making pretty clear copies of the original without changing much at all would violate some kind of copyright law.

Yes. But these ITC/LT/MT/EF/SB/SH/BT … versions of the same design using the same name are based on licensing contracts usually going back decades when designs were sub-licensed in bulk for various markets and technologies. The results are pretty messy now with so many different versions sold online next to each other, even in the same online shop. But these versions were created a long time ago and ended up next to each other by accident, because of company mergers and so on. As you realize, it wouldn’t make much sense to approach the owner of the intellectual property today and pay for a license to create yet another copy. But that’s not what is happening. 

1 hour ago, YoYoBobbyJoe said:

But, surely someone owns the font still? Like, a family member or a corporation owns the copyright and publishing capabilities of the original font? Because I feel like these big foundries making pretty clear copies of the original without changing much at all would violate some kind of copyright law.

As previously stated, it's complicated. Just remember that copyright is personal, tied to the creator and non-transferable. Patents and other forms of juridical protection can be held and renewed by other people and entities. So, even if Walt Disney's personal copyrights will expire in 11 years, it doesn't mean that Mickey Mouse will be up for grabs any time soon .

Alright, for future typography initiates browsing threads wondering the same thing I did, this thread summoned a YouTube video through immaculate conception that somewhat explains the ideas that people have laid out here: 

 

A little clickbaity and a little sloppy, but there is some truth in there as well. 

I need to stress again that the lack of copyright is a weird thing that happened in the USA alone. It’s not the state of affairs in general as the video suggests by just talking about the lack of copyright. 

Saying you can’t trademark it is blatantly false. It’s in fact the main approach to defend typefaces and it works almost without fail. The font peculiarities don’t matter in this regard, as it is just about trade protection. Building a trade name is where the money is. If you happen to create yet another design extremely similar to Helvetica, hardly anyone will notice or care. It’s just not worth a legal fight over the design, even if one could potentially win in certain circumstances in certain jurisdictions. But if you try to release the design as “My Helvetica“, Monotype’s lawyers will stop you immediately using their trademark. 

17 hours ago, Ralf Herrmann said:

The font peculiarities don’t matter in this regard, as it just about trade protection. Building a trade name is where the money is.

Very true. Only indirectly related to type, but all copyrights on the books of Edgar Rice Burroughs expired years ago, yet his books are not available in the public domain in the United States. (But they are in, for example, Australia, where most can be found on the Australian Gutenberg Project.) Why? Because when the copyrights were expiring, Burroughs's heirs promptly registered names and titles (such as "Tarzan") as trade names or trademarks in the United States.