In a poetic twist of digital justice, the world’s most famous anti-piracy ad may have used a pirated font.
It’s been twenty years since that unforgettable public service announcement snarled across screens with the line: “You wouldn’t steal a car.”
Meant to scare would-be movie downloaders straight, the video became the face of the movie industry’s war on piracy. It also, unintentionally, became one of the most parodied ads in internet history.
But now, two decades later, the campaign has been hit with a plot twist worthy of its own straight-to-DVD thriller: new evidence suggests the anti-piracy campaign may have pirated the font it used. Yes, really.
Originally released in 2004 as part of the “Piracy: It’s a Crime” campaign, the PSA equated digital piracy with snatching handbags, TVs, and even cars.
While the dramatic montage and ominous music burned into the public consciousness and became a meme goldmine, few people looked too closely at the typography. They are now.
For years, speculation swirled online that the campaign’s music may have been pirated. False, as it turns out. But recent discoveries around the font are much harder to shake.
The iconic “YOU WOULDN’T STEAL” typography appears suspiciously similar to FF Confidential, a commercial font designed in 1992 by Just Van Rossum.
But when internet sleuths, including Melissa Lewis on Bluesky and another user named “Rib,” dug into archived files, they found something odd: the font embedded in a 2005 PDF from the official campaign site wasn’t FF Confidential. It was XBAND Rough.
XBAND Rough is a free font created in 1996 by Catapult Entertainment. It looks eerily identical to Van Rossum’s FF Confidential, and as type experts will tell you, it’s a straight-up clone.
In other words, the ad’s creators may have used a knockoff of a paid font, without a license, for a campaign that was literally about not stealing things.
Van Rossum hadn’t heard that part before. “I knew my font was used for the campaign and that a pirated clone named XBand-Rough existed. 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,” he told TorrentFreak.
He’s not planning on pursuing anything legally. After all, he no longer manages licensing; that’s now up to Monotype, and previously FontShop International. But the irony is not lost on him. Or on anyone else, for that matter.
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