Japanese law doesn’t consider font itself or the style to be copyrighted, but font files are considered “program” (it is very broad in jurisdictional sense, roughly means digital data that produce products through computational process, which displaying letters on moniter is applicable) and thus fall under under copyright protection.
xthexder@l.sw0.com 12 hours ago
That’s what I was saying with the .ttf file being copyright. It’s entirely possible to generate a new “program” that produces the same shapes while being a brand new uncopyrighted program. There’s an infinite number of ways to describe how to draw a shape, only one of them is copyright.
inconel@lemmy.ca 6 hours ago
Again, the program is not program in general sense. The real “program” part here is ttf format and protocol around there, but protection goes over ttf data as a whole. It may be able to argue if such new font display system is developed and used, no gamedev/publishing industries want to reinvent the wheel and built the ecosystem from scratch.
Also, even with such system copied fonts are likely sued because of Japanese law concept of “依拠性”, a concept related to similarly that accused product intended to copy/based on protected entity as long as end result is the same.