MPAA
The entertainment industry made a concerted effort to combat the piracy that became a hot topic of conversation toward the start of the 2000s, and the MPAA produced a PSA that’s intimately familiar to most people who went to see a movie during that era. However, that spot may have actually featured a font that also skirted the law.
Most people were still getting acquainted with the internet toward the start of the millennium, but it was clear the World Wide Web had the potential to revolutionize the way humans interacted and disrupt basically every industry on the planet.
That was certainly the case with peer-to-peer networks like Napster and Limewire that caused record companies to sound the alarm after making it possible to gain access to music without having to pay a single penny for a song or an album, and movie studios soon found themselves facing a similar issue due as online piracy started to gain steam.
In 2004, the Motion Picture Association of America commissioned an anti-piracy PSA that ran in theaters and tended to be an unskippable message on DVDs being sold at the time.
It harnessed Aristotle’s rhetorical concept of logos to dissuade people from pirating by comparing it to the theft of physical items, including the fairly iconic message “You Wouldn’t Steal A Car” that was plastered on the screen in a font that perfectly encapsulates the “Xtreme” aesthetic of the era when the spot was produced.
One study suggests that PSA and others like it actually exacerbated the piracy problem, and we were recently treated to another intriguing twist thanks to evidence that suggests the MPAA failed to properly license the font that was used to help get its message across.
According to TorrentFreak, it appeared “You Wouldn’t Steal A Car” and the other messages that appeared on the screen in the PSA harnessed FF Confidential, a legally protected typeface that was designed by Just Van Rossum in 1992.
However, a BlueSky user who did some digging obtained a PDF produced for the anti-piracy campaign in 2005 before determining it was actually XBand-Rough, an unsanctioned ripoff of FF Confidential.
By using FontForge on a PDF from the website for the campaign (web.archive.org/web/20051223…); I can confirm that they are indeed using the illegal clone version of the font, rather than the licensed one!
— Rib (@rib.gay) April 23, 2025 at 12:13 PM
As the outlet notes, there is a (seemingly slim chance) the font used in the PSA was properly licensed and the one in the PDF was simply different, although it seems a bit hard to believe that was actually the case; Van Rossum also told them there probably won’t be any repercussions based on how much time has passed while noting he’s no longer involved with the licensing aspect of the font.
Content shared from brobible.com.