You wouldn’t steal a font: Famous anti-piracy campaign may have used pirated typeface

A famous anti-piracy campaign from the early 2000s is in the spotlight after it appeared the font used in the adverts was pirated.

The dramatic campaign compared pirating films to stealing cars, handbags and televisions, telling viewers: “You wouldn’t steal a car”. It appeared in cinemas and on DVDs around the world from 2004.

But now, social media users have discovered the font used in the campaign was pirated from a typeface created by designer Just van Rossum.

Bluesky user Rib extracted the fonts used in one of the campaign’s old PDFs and discovered the pirated font Xband-Rough was used instead of Mr van Rossum’s licensed font FF Confidential.

Sky News was able to replicate this process and found the same results.

There’s no evidence to suggest that the campaign’s designers were aware that the font was pirated, as copies of it were being widely shared at the time.

The creator of the original font doesn’t seem too worried, however. Mr van Rossum told Sky News:

“I had known about the “illegal clone” of my font before, but I didn’t know that that was the one used in the campaign.

“The campaign has always had the wrong tone, which (to me) explains the level of fun that has been had at its expense. The irony of it having used a pirated font is just precious.”

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The adverts became a piece of pop culture history, with spoofs spawned for years afterwards.

In fact, if you try to go to the campaign’s official URL, you will be redirected to the most famous spoof, a sketch in the sitcom IT Crowd.

Sky News contacted the organisations behind the adverts, the UK’s anti-piracy agency FACT, America’s Motion Picture Association and the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore.

FACT declined to comment, saying the campaign pre-dated anyone working at the organisation.

The other two organisations did not immediately comment.