You wouldn’t steal a font: It turns out famous anti-piracy advert font may have been… pirated

You can’t make this up

2 weeks ago

Remember the advert that was like “you wouldn’t steal a car” and had that super aggressive music playing in the background? Yeah, the one that was meant to be all about stealing films and piracy, and always played at the cinema? Well guys, the font used in it may have been pirated. You seriously couldn’t write this.

The adverts have become engrained in UK pop culture, and are definitely nostalgic of cinema trips when you were a kid. They compared stealing films to stealing cars and handbags, and reminded cinema goers that recording and distributing films illegally was just as serious of a crime.

But now, Sky News has reported the 2000s adverts may have used a pirated font. According to the publication, people online have discovered the font used was pirated from a typeface created by designer, Just van Rossum.

The report has said someone “extracted the fonts” used in one of the campaigns, and “discovered the pirated font Xband-Rough was used instead of Mr van Rossum’s licensed font FF Confidential.” Sky News has said it also recreated the test, and found the same result.

Sky News has said there’s no evidence the advert creators had any idea this was the case, but hilariously ironic it is nonetheless. It doesn’t seem the ad creators will get into too much trouble either, as the font creator laughed the entire drama off.

“I knew my font was used for the campaign and that a pirated clone named XBand-Rough existed,” he told tech news website, TorrentFreak. “I did not know that the campaign used XBand-Rough and not FF Confidential, though. So this fact is new to me, and I find it hilarious.”