Summary
People of a certain age will all be very aware of an anti-piracy ad campaign that ran for years in the early 2000s. The ads, which had an overtly threatening aura, would question why you’d steal a movie if you wouldn’t steal a car or a handbag. Well, turns out whoever was behind that campaign may have stolen its font.
A Bluesky user who goes by Ribappears to have made the initial discovery more than 20 years on from the ads seemingly being used on every single DVD produced for about half a decade. By using something called FontForge, Rib appears to have discovered that the original anti-piracy ads were using a pirated version of a font called FF Confidential rather than the original, with the unlicensed copycat the creators opted for named XBAND Rough.
Sky Newshas replicated the process and discovered the same results, those being that whoever spearheaded this campaign seemingly used a stolen font in an anti-piracy ad campaign so effective, people still make memes about it to this day. The top reply to Rib’s original Bluesky post is someone taking a screenshot from the ad and editing it so that it says “You wouldn’t steal a font”.
Effective might be the wrong word. As much as that ad campaign and its allegedly stolen font is forever burned into my brain, it didn’t deter me from using Limewire and riddling my parents' PC with viruses in the process. How was I to know downloading LiNkIn.PaRk-NuMb.exe might infect my computer?
Remember The Ads Asking Why You Wouldn’t Steal A Car?
Turns Out They May Have Been Trying To Scare You Using A Stolen Font
Sky News managed to track down the creator and owner of FF Confidential, the font that should have been licensed for the ad, Mr van Rossum, and it doesn’t seem like he cares about his work being potentially stolen all that much.
I had known about the ‘illegal clone’ of my font before, but I didn’t know that that was the one used in the campaign. The campaign has 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.
Sky also reached out to the organizations in the US, the UK, and Singapore that used the campaign for comment. FACT, the UK’s anti-piracy agency, was the only one that replied, noting the campaign and the decisions around it predate anyone currently employed there.
It’s not the first time the infamous ads have been called into question for stealing. The campaign has previously been accused of using pirated music, but no one has ever been able to confirm that. The ads were just text on a screen with music playing, so if both the music and the font were pirated, there’s a chance everything in these ads urging you not to steal movies was stolen.
