BROOKLYN (CN) - The Font Bureau claims a Fort Lauderdale businessman copied and sold more than 500 of its type fonts. The Boston-based plaintiff says it has designed fonts for 30 years for Newsweek, Apple, Microsoft, the Wall Street Journal and others. It claims David Chaves copied its fonts and sold them over the Internet.
The Font Bureau sued Chaves and his companies, Fontshop Sweden and Font & Image America.
The Font Bureau says it specializes in designing electronic type fonts. It claims the defendants swiped its designs and sold them through defendants' Web site, fonsthop.se.
The Font Bureau demands more than $1 million in damages, information about defendants' products and customers, an accounting and an injunction ordering the defendants to deliver all of their infringing products for destruction.
(For the historically minded, Steve Jobs included a range of font selections on his first Apple computers after Jobs took a calligraphy class from Lloyd Reynolds at Reed College. When Jobs, who dropped out of Reed and founded Apple with Steve Wozniak, gave Apple users a choice of fonts, it forced competing computer companies to do likewise. Since then, font design, a previously obscure corner of the publishing world, has become a fond preoccupation of computer users worldwide.)
The Font Bureau is represented by Frank Martinez.
Read the Top 8
Sign up for the Top 8, a roundup of the day's top stories delivered directly to your inbox Monday through Friday.
