Claim No: IL-2024-000036 - [2025] EWHC 2172 (Ch)

It is necessary to say something briefly about typefaces. The parties sometimes referred to typefaces as fonts – for consistency, I have used the word “typefaces”, other than where the word “fonts” appears in excerpts from documents.

A typeface is a body of individual glyphs that make up a language system, such as an alphabet, numbers and punctuation marks. Each character is available in multiple glyphs, representing upper and lower cases, bold, italics as well as (often) different weights (from thin to bold). A commercially marketable typeface needs more than 400 glyphs to support many of the major European languages (called Extended Latin). Whilst an Extended Latin typeface can handle, for example, French and Spanish, it cannot be used for languages such as Ukrainian which use the Cyrillic alphabet. The additional characters necessary are called a language extension. For Basic Cyrillic, this involves adding 61 characters. 17 of those characters can been automatically generated using commercially available software, but the others need to be designed. Of further importance is the concept of kerning, which is the spacing of characters within a typeface.

Thus, a commercially available typeface which includes a Cyrillic extension may include hundreds or thousands of characters. I was told that a typeface with eight weights can be licensed for £119.95 – and each weight licensed for £28.95.

Cyrillic extensions (like other language extensions) are not licensed separately – this would not provide a user with sufficient letters to be able to construct proper sentences. As noted above, some Extended Latin characters are necessary to write in a language which uses the Cyrillic alphabet.

Typefaces are given names – Times New Roman and Arial are well-known examples.