 Hello. Thanks for showing up anyway. Apparently today is Swiss national day, which is very appropriate because my talk is very cheesy and it's full of holes. This is the short title. This is the full title. But it's not really about begging. It's about helping. Nobody on this planet, especially not in this room, believes that money is everything. Even if they say so, even if they think they believe it. So, to different degrees, we are all looking to help other people. And this is a stratagem that I realized recently. And it's also a way to reconcile. But first things first, this is a font conference. Let's do what we care about first. Color phone. This is a very interesting font. Do you see the red arrow? Are you sure? I don't want you to miss it. So, the font on top is a monster. It means pattern in Norwegian. It's also kind of monstrous. And it's by the monochrome foundry, one of my favorite little font foundries in Norway. Designed by Sindra Bremnes. And this font is Trilby by David Jonathan Ross. It's kind of a... You'll probably notice by now that these are reverse contrast fonts. And I use them for this talk because it's my only hope of being trendy. No, actually I use them because they kind of allude to non-Latin scripts. And after I made this slide, I realized, you know, maybe this is better. So, this is my best attempt at humor. The rest of the talk is very serious. So, intellectual property divides people. Especially the last, I don't know, 20 years. There are many people who think that it shouldn't be a property that you can own. Those are obviously the ones on the left. And then there are people who create something and they treat it almost too preciously. And the problem isn't that these opinions exist. The problem is that there's a reverse bell curve. I told you it's going to be cheesy. There's a reverse bell curve and it doesn't work. You can see it's cracked. The reverse bell curve doesn't work because there's no dialogue. It's just people at each end throwing things at each other. And I realized recently, like I said, that there is a sort of a fruit from middle ground. And I don't know how I got myself in this position. Mostly I just want people to get along. Or it could be that I just want to have as many people to disagree with as possible. But my purpose is to show that there is a fruit from middle ground. And if you notice, those are all exotic fruits. They're non-Latin fruits. And that's because honestly I'm not sure how Libre is useful culturally to Latin. But there is some secret there that makes it very useful to non-Latins. And a little bit about my culture first. This is our official fruit, pomegranate. Armenian. And it's not just Armenians that this is relevant to. I think most cultures share things that are not part of Latin culture. I'll detail that later. But this is a typical Armenian fruit. This used to be called aerial Armenian. And the reason it was called aerial Armenian is because the person took aerial and took the outlines, copy-pasted, which is the usual modest upper-end. And he made Armenian font and he distributed it. This is before Armenia became on the radar of copyright people. But this person, Ruben Tarumyan, is actually one of the heroes of Armenian font intellectual property because he successfully suits somebody in Armenia because he was using the fonts. I think he was reselling them. I'm not even sure. But he remains very proud that he won a loss within Armenia for font protection for the total amount of $1,000, which is nothing compared to how much work he had done on it. But my point is that the reason this happened is because many cultures, even more than here, don't value fonts as something you have to buy. They don't value them as intellectual property. Here's something from last year in the private school in Hollywood. They used four fonts. And this is the Armenian version. There's one font. That's not because they didn't want to. They did. Look, there's four fonts on the English one. And this is a font that's one of the years truly made this in 1998 and it's still being used. And I'm not advocating this. This is an actual, I didn't make this up. This is a restaurant in Glendale. And I'm not advocating this. But there is a desire in this case and in many cases to use more fonts and they're just not there. And the reason they're not there is partly because Armenians don't like to pay for fonts. And that's true of most cultures. But it's also because there aren't any out there. And it's not just the fonts that are on your system. The font in this case is not on the system. You have to download it. It's the fact that there just aren't enough. And many of the ones that are out there don't look right. They were made as a necessity and some of the letters are wrong. And they're legible. But an Armenian looking at them will realize, oh, this was an old Armenian who made this. Now, one of the reasons Armenian fonts don't exist in enough numbers, even though we have a great respect for our alphabet, we really venerate it, is that it's expected to have an English companion, a Latin companion. And it's not easy to make a Latin font. It's easy to, my favorite expression is it's never been easier to start a typeface and it's never been more difficult to finish a typeface. There are so many things that have to be added in there, especially character sets. And every year Unicode adds new things. And it's really gotten out of hand. So this is a proposed character. Here's another one. And here's another one. Alternate University. And if this goes on, we're going to end up with, you know, Smiley's even in Unicode, right? And there, there. Look at that Unicode number on the right side. And I'm not making this up. So it's a lot. And it takes time, if you want to do a good job, it takes a long time. And yeah, it's a labor of love, but you're not going to, you know, we don't want Romeo and Juliet, the tragic death here, you know. Love, love, it's not that love has its limits, it's that love has a place in life. And there are other things to worry about too. This is from yesterday. Dave Crossland started asking a, not a, I wouldn't call this a rhetorical question. This is more of a question that's fishing for answers, which is my favorite kind. And Bruno Mag, who's the principal of Dalton Mag Foundry, which is probably the biggest non-Latin found house out there, said they are not unless they start paying for it. Now, who is they the second day? Who is they? Who's going to pay for this? Is it Armenians who, individual Armenians? For example, in the case of Armenian, I'm just using that as an example. That's not going to happen. There is a way that pays for these things. And my clients are all they. They are companies. They're not owned by Armenians. There's no Armenians working there. They want to do business in Armenia. So they pay somebody to either fix the Armenian they put together or to make one from scratch. So what's interesting is that the people benefiting culturally are not the ones paying for it. And that's okay by me. That's a very elegant solution. So the, the they is not one thing. So there are people benefiting, but they don't have to pay for it. They're benefiting. And the right people are paying for it. And, but the problem is still there because of, it's a really, it's a very big task to design Armenian, the design a Latin font. Now, why don't, why don't we let non-Armenians design Armenian fonts? For example, why don't we let, it's not that we don't let, but what's the problem if a non-Latin font is designed by somebody who's not what I call a native? That's not a pejorative term. Native is somebody who has early exposure. And I get a lot of flak for this, but I believe in, I believe in puberty. I believe that puberty is very big deal. And whatever you're exposed to before that is when, is when you're learning. After that there's a transition. And after that you move to doing. And you do things based on what you learned. If you don't have exposure to something before a certain age, that's pretty early, you will, you're very unlikely to have nativity in it. Not a Christian thing. Nativity means a native ability. For example, if you grow up in Lebanon, you will have nativity in Arabic and Latin. If you're an Armenian who grows up in Lebanon, you will have nativity in three scripts. Later on, even if you're not a type designer, if somebody shows you a font in Arabic or Latin or Armenian, and it gives you the wrong feeling, you will know. You will not maybe be able to put your finger on what's wrong with it. But you will be able to tell the person this isn't right. And this is a feeling that the person asking you who doesn't have nativity will not feel. Because it's not in there. It's in the conscious layer and it's not native. It's learned. A lot of very capable, very dedicated type designers have made very poor non-Latin fonts for this reason. And these days it's better. People have the humility to ask for help. They even pay money to get proper consulting on something they might not agree with this view of nativity, but they do realize that they just can't do it by themselves. So it's nice when a non-Latin font is designed by a native. Ethnic ethics is not like Disney Channel. On the Disney Channel, people make a mistake and then they apologize and they do the right thing and everything is fine. That's not how, unfortunately, that's not how most of the world works in terms of intellectual property and fonts in particular. So it's sad to say that it's almost a matter of principle not to pay for a font in many cultures. And again, the saving grace is that they don't have to pay to benefit companies who are hoping to make money off of them can pay. And they will benefit culturally because they will have better typography in a small way. This is also our small world that we have to make better. There is a difference between western and non-western respect of intellectual property. Here's the cruncher. A lot of people who make non-Latin fonts do it because it's like I said, labor of love. They love their culture. It's not just that they like to make shapes. They want shapes to be useful. And my brother and I made Armenian fonts on the Commodore 64 in 1983. It was simply because it wasn't available. And we wanted to express our culture on this thing, on this device. And that can migrate into making high quality fonts for other Armenians or other people to use. The problem is, if the strain becomes too much, if you're dedicating hours of the day and your wife is looking at you and she's saying, why are you doing that? And if she asks you how many copies of this have you sold? And you say, well, I might sell one this year. That's not going to fly. So you have to be able to accommodate the real life. You can't be altruistic. You can't say, oh, people should be so dedicated that they do it for free all of the time. Some people will. That's great. But our reality isn't like that. So they can give up. So they can realize, OK, this isn't going to work. I can't pay for my kids' college if I spend my time doing fonts. And they'll just stop. And then years later, at a family dinner, an in-law will say, hey, Hago, didn't you use to make fonts for an army? They'll just laugh it off. And that's where it'll end. So a day job, which is what most people have, obstructs the design of a very large Latin companion. So this is kind of the key moment here that I realized that Libre fonts offer a choice, but this is the problem. The problem is the OFL license, which has very good intentions, does not click with the reality in non-Latin type design. Most people don't know this. I'll explain it quickly. The OFL license allows you, Libre fonts allow you to redistribute, modify, redistribute. They don't allow you to make money off of it. And that sounds very nice. But it's the kind of thing I like hearing. But because it ties your hands in that way, the only way is if you do it unethically, I don't want to encourage that, you have to give it away because it was free to begin with. And that's a deal breaker, that's the problem. That ends up harming these cultures that you're supposedly worried about social justice, but in the end it won't happen. The Apache license, not my favorite name for it, but the Apache license is more inclusive. It sounds like it doesn't care, but maybe that's what it was at first. But to me, the Apache license cares about human nature enough that it allows people, if they want, to make money off of it. Apache still allows designers to give it away. And if there is a free version of what you're trying to sell, people can go get it. It's not like it's difficult to find information on the web and anywhere else these days. So it's not some evil thing to take an Apache font and try to make money by selling a derivative. For example, you take a Latin font that has 3,000 characters because somebody was paid that is day job to do that. And release it as a Libre font and under the Apache license, you can add an Armenian to it, sell it, maybe a client can commission it, or you can sell it. And the beneficiaries will be end users. And you do this because you can't do it for free. So you cannot force people to make, to give away their expertise because you think they should. Some will, and that's great. Other people, it just won't fit in their lifestyle. And I think this is the majority of non-Latin, non-Western type designers who are not living here in the West. But you can leave the door open. And one nice thing is Adobe Source now has an Apache version, which was very encouraging to see. And we're in this together. Let's help each other contribute to type in as many ways as we can. Thank you very much. I'll take your questions and ridicule during the coffee break. Thank you.