“You Wouldn’t Steal a Car,” one of the most infamous anti-piracy campaigns of all time, used a pirated font to spell out its slogan. The creator of the real font, called FF Confidential, told 404 Media “the irony is extremely funny indeed.”
“Piracy. It’s a Crime” was a series of PSAs that in 2004 was a joint project between the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore and the Motion Picture Association, and has been widely parodied in the two decades since. It is most famously (mis)remembered as “You Wouldn’t Download a Car,” and has spawned a huge number of memes over the years. Last week, Melissa Lewis, a data reporter at the Center for Investigative Reporting, pointed out that the very recognizable font used by the campaign, called FF Confidential, was created by famous font designer Just van Rossum.
Lewis’s thread made the rounds, and eventually several folks (including Lewis) pointed out that, actually, the “You Wouldn’t Steal a Car” campaign did not use the font FF Confidential and instead used a pirated clone of the font called Xband Rough, which was confirmed by a Bluesky user named Rib, who downloaded a 2005 PDF from the campaign saved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine which used the pirated version of the font. Van Rossum confirmed to 404 Media that Xband Rough was an illegal ripoff of his original font.
“I was aware of the campaign using my font, but not that they actually used the illegal clone,” he said. “The irony is extremely funny indeed.”
All of this may feel like relatively obscure ancient internet history, but the discovery actually helped surface even more obscure history about the origins of the Xband Rough pirated font. Internet freedom activist and friend of 404 Media Parker Higgins has, over the years, sought the origins of the Xband Rough font, and the confirmation from van Rossum that it was a pirated version of FF Confidential helped fill in some blanks.
During the 2016 Google v Oracle trial (the specifics of which are beyond the scope of this blog but which had to do with whether Google reimplementing parts of Oracle’s Java APIs and source code was fair use under copyright law), Higgins made “You Wouldn’t Reimplement an API” t-shirts and stickers using Xband Rough. Higgins sold roughly 1,000 shirts with this logo, and he became very interested in the origins of Xband Rough.
“I try to be pretty meticulous about fonts when I'm making a parody image, so I spent a chunk of time researching when I made the ‘You wouldn't reimplement an API’ graphic. At the time the only information I could find was about XBAND Rough, which I used, but even then I was curious about why such an iconic font had such a murky provenance,” Higgins said.
Higgins figured that XBAND Rough had something to do with XBAND, which is an early gaming modem for the Sega Genesis and Super NES that was sold at Blockbuster in the mid 90s. The font used on the XBAND modem itself has a somewhat similar vibe to FF Confidential. “I was able to dig up some metadata that tied the font to the XBand service and peripheral, including (ironically, now) some copyright information on different font websites,” Higgins said. “XBand the service was a little before my time, but I dug into it then and even found this wild promo video, which seemed 90s in sort of precisely the same way as the font, so it all made enough sense.”
“For years I'd chuckled at the thought that XBand's greatest legacy was secretly typographic, and I've had to re-evaluate that as I've learned about FF Confidential,” he added.
Anyways, if you know more about who pirated XBand Rough, and whether it has anything to do with the XBAND Modem, please reach out.
