Written by John D. Lewis
on 

With Copyright Protectors Like These, who Needs Enemies? - Brand New

Hadopi Logo (via underconsideration.com)

One of my favorite blogs is Brand New. Each post is informative and enjoyable. Recently, they posted an incredible story displaying the dangers of protectors failing to live up to their own standards. Hadopi, the French agency responsible for policing copyright violations and protecting creators from intellectual property theft is guilty of the same. Here’s the short story:

  1. The government hires an agency to design the logo
  2. The agency (Plan Créatif) mocks up a logo
  3. The logo was found to include 2 unlicensed fonts (Bienvenue, which was designed by Jean François Porchez exclusively for France Télécom and only available via websites hosting illegal materials, and Bliss, designed by Jeremy Tankard)
  4. The agency quickly licenses Bliss and replaces Bienvenue with FS Lola (designed for FontSmith by Phil Garnham)
  5. A new, properly licensed logo is released (though the fonts were licensed on the day the logo was released to the public!)

Pretty amazing. For the first post exposing the problem, written by Jean-Baptiste Levée, read his post on graphism.fr. See Le Point’s post (1/11/2010) for a French perspective, or Font Feed’s post. BoingBoing and Torrentfreak also have coverage. It even garnered TV coverage (LCI; in french).