There’s an infamous anti-piracy advertisement from back in 2004 that online oldsters will immediately recognize: “You wouldn’t steal a car,” it begins, complete with shakycam footage of some sketchy looking dude popping a lock, before rolling into various other types of theft and eventually equating it all with downloading a copy of Shrek 2. The ad makes it dramatically clear: Stealing Shrek will get you hard time in the slam when you’re inevitably busted for your criminal ways.
It was, and is, overwrought and silly, and so of course it inspired numerous parodies and memes: The British comedy series The IT Crowd did a particularly good one a few years after the original aired—in fact the old URL, piracyisacrime.com, now directs to The IT Crowd Clip on YouTube. I urge you to watch it. The ad itself was only around for a short time, but “you wouldn’t download a car” has endured in shitpost form for decades; it’s practically embedded in the fabric of the internet at this point.
But as good as many of these parodies are, none are as ridiculous (and funny) as the recent discovery that the world’s best-known anti-piracy ad may have used a pirated font.
The distinctive font used in the ad appears to be FF Confidential, created by Just van Rossum in 1992. But there’s another font called XBand Rough that’s virtually identical, and when journalist Melissa Lewis reached out to van Rossum about it, he told her XBand Rough is an “illegal clone” of FF Confidential.
This is where it gets interesting. After all this, another Bluesky user named Rib used the FontForge tool on a PDF file from the old anti-piracy campaign, available via the Wayback Machine, and discovered the file in question uses the XBand Rough font—the clone.
If I could steal a car by downloading it over the internet without depriving the original owner of it and with similarly low risk of getting caught/prosecuted for it I would absolutely steal a car. I wouldn’t steal a font tho, that’s just beyond the pale. :P
My eighty year-old parents have “borrowed” my car for a year.
I, too, would download one if I could.
The thing about the parasitic class is that they are not obligated to be logically congruent… They are always right.
These standards only apply to the wage slave class.
I haven’t been this shocked since I found out the original McGruff voice actor was arrested with a bunch of guns and weed plants
Wasn’t there also a problem with the music rights?
Time to update that headline
The hypocrisy is unreal. I have been successfully holding onto my final shred of hope in the goodness of humankind, but this tips the scale. I give up. Now I only have despair in the badness of humunkind. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to drown my sorrow by bingeing on Napster, Scour, BitTorrent, newsgroups, and Gnutella.
In fairness, I poisoned one food item in every music executive’s house as punishment for them being thieves.
I forgot about Dre but I was fairly comprehensive.
