TIL the music used in the infamous "you wouldn't download a car" anti-piracy advert was pirated

So, there was an anti piracy advert, and it had pirated music, but it was a different one?

TIL

I would be very cautious about that.

US font IP law has some unusual quirks.

Historically, the US took the position that typefaces could not be copyrighted.

Later on, case law established that digital font files — maybe only vector ones, not sure, but it did apply to vector font files — could be copyrighted.

What this resulted in was a common practice in the US that I recall in the 1990s or so having people print out vector fonts (which put them in a non-copyrighted form), then scan them back in, vectorize them, and make a usable font. The font wasn’t great, only approximated the letterforms of the original, and I doubt that they recreated kerning correctly, but it worked more-or-less. Then they’d sell sell bulk collections of these recreated fonts.

The fonts were knockoffs, but that doesn’t mean that they were infringing under US copyright law.

That may be what was going on with that font.

The comp.fonts FAQ has an extended discussion on the topic (and based on that, raster font files also are indeed not copyrightable, just vector).

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/fonts-faq/part2/

And it made people more likely to steal cars.

Streisand effect at it again

This ad was how I learned digital piracy existed

It’s not true.