I do not claim any rights to the original raster binary data charsets, which this work is based on. Credit for these goes to their respective designers.
The font files in this pack (TTF and FON remakes and enhancements) are my own work, hereby licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
"tl;dr" version (which is not a substitute for the license):
- You may freely share and adapt / transform / enhance them for any purpose
- You must give appropriate credit (with the author's name + a link to the original material); the preferred form of attribution is my handle "VileR" and a link to this site's Home page
- If you distribute your own adaptations, do so under a compatible license
- No warranties are given - whatever you do, I will not be held liable
Enjoy!
In addition, there are a couple of points that should be made quite clear. Out of all the comments I've received about this collection, a small minority of people have assumed a priori that its legal status is dubious at best, that the original binary charsets are protected by copyrights (which are being infringed), and/or that I act in bad faith by taking credit for my work on it.
It should be noted that I've done quite a bit of research into this issue, and everything I've turned up supports the conclusion that there's nothing illegal about this work. US law (which happens to have this site under its jurisdiction) does not consider typefaces to be copyrightable material, and making derivative versions does not infringe on anyone's intellectual property. If I was re-distributing the original programs which render these fonts onto a computer screen - such as firmware/driver code, or TrueType files that were the *original distribution format* - that would've been a different story. However, all fonts here were originally simple bitmap data; I am providing new software to reproduce these old glyphs in different (and sometimes expanded) formats.
There's enough material online to consult on this subject if you wish (the comp.fonts FAQ is a good starting point). It's probably safe to consider the lack of past precedents, too. The most commonly-seen of these fonts are the ones from IBM, which have been duplicated bit-for-bit by countless manufacturers in their own hardware - from Hercules to nVidia - and sold with this hardware practically everywhere on the planet. I couldn't find information about a single lawsuit resulting from that (as opposed to, say, companies that infringed on IBM's BIOS code). By itself, lack of precedent is not a sufficient argument, but it does support the one already made - and precedents for NON-infringement certainly exist (e.g. Eltra Corp. v. Ringer).
As for bad-faith arguments ("you just ripped a bunch of fonts and repackaged them!"), rest assured that there's more to it than that. Creating this collection has involved a lot of hard research, conversion and optimization work to ensure that the originals are represented both faithfully and usefully, something that is far from trivial; there are also my own additions in the 'Plus' versions and the remapped charsets. This work surely merits *some* credit, and that is the only credit I claim.
- VileR, 2020-07