- A famous anti-piracy advert may be guilty of piracy
- Eagle-eyed fans on social media made an unlikely connection
- Fans have weighed in online
A famous anti-piracy advert from the early 2000s may be guilty of the very crime it was trying to prevent.
Odds are, you will have seen this advert on DVDs or in theatres.
Soundtracked to a scratchy jingle, it poses viewers with a number of fake scenarios likening video piracy with regular theft.
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A montage of clips shows a figure at a computer screen, seemingly illegally downloading a film.
“You wouldn’t steal a car,” it says before adding, “you wouldn’t steal a handbag.” It continues, saying “You wouldn’t steal a television,” and “you wouldn’t steal a movie.”
The short advert concludes by pairing its message in black and white terms: “Downloading pirated films is stealing. Stealing is against the law.”
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You know the one. Now, social media sleuths have discovered that the font the advert used may have actually been pirated.
Was the anti-piracy advert font pirated?
While unconfirmed, some uncovered information makes it look very likely that the font used in this advert could have been obtained from less than authentic routes.
According to many different outlets, a Bluesky user going under the name Rib managed to extract the fonts used in the ad from an old PDF linked to the campaign.
According to their claims, the font used was a pirated version of XBand-Rough which was a copy of the official typeface FF Confidential, created by a designer named Just van Rossum.
Other outlets like Sky News used similar methods and found the same results, meaning that there could be some truth behind this claim.
Original font creator isn’t too fussed
There’s no clear indication that the folks behind this originally campaign knowingly used this fake font.
Outlets have reached out to America’s Motion Picture Association, the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore and the anti-piracy agency FACT but no real comments have been shared thus far.
That said, the original font designer doesn’t seem too fussed. Speaking to Sky News, he said he felt the advert “always had the wrong tone, which (to me) explains the level of fun that has been had at its expense.
The irony of it having used a pirated font is just precious,” added Van Rossum.
