The Anti-Pirate Code ⇥ fedi.rib.gay

Melissa Lewis on Bluesky:

TIL: The 2000s piracy PSA used a font designed by the fantastic Just van Rossum, whose brother Guido created the Python programming language.

[…]

I reached out to van Rossum, and Xband Rough is indeed an “illegal clone” of FF Confidential; it’s just been around forever and is ubiquitous. I have no idea whether the PSA used the original, and felt too shy to ask!

“Rib”:

Naturally, it would be hilarious if the anti-piracy campaign actually turned out to have used this pirated font, so I went sleuthing and quickly found a PDF from the campaign site with the font embedded (https://web.archive.org/web/[…]150605_8PP_brochure.pdf).

So I chucked it into FontForge and yep, turns out the campaign used a pirated font the entire time!

They are more like guidelines, you could say.