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It is one of the best -known PSAs for a certain generation of millennial that downloaded free films and music in the mid -2000s. The anti-piracy display “You would not steal a car” is fried in countless brains for her stupid music, your silly message and her unmistakable style. But what if this style itself had been pirated copies? This is the claim that is made by people on social media who have dug a little.
The TV display that is available on YouTubeIn 2004, and if you haven’t seen it for a while, it is worth taking a walk into the past.
The display contained animated graphics with the inscription “You would not steal a car” and “you would not steal a handbag” and “you would not steal a television”, which is all displayed in a unique font. Then we come to the real message of the ad, with the message “You would not steal DVD” finally with “Downloading Pirated films is stealing”.
The font is so unique that the PSA is often parodied in a way that you can recognize immediately, and it shows itself as a meme on social media all the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs6ncgeyszc
As Torrent freak It indicates that the writing was created in the PSA in 1992 by Just van Rossum. And people have long assumed that people used this font behind the advertisement.
But online sheets recently discovered the old campaign materials that the font actually used as XBand Rough. It looks confidential as FF because it was illegally cloned from this font, but XBand Rough was free. And so it was a pirated copies of a font for which people had to pay for.
“Of course it would be funny if the anti-piracy campaign actually used this pirated copy. That’s why I went sleepy and quickly found a PDF from the campaign site with embedded font” explained.
Torrent Freak confirmed that the font in the campaign materials is rough, but there is still the possibility that the font used in the TV ads was a licensed version that was bought and paid. Unfortunately there is no way to check that.
The simple fact that the campaign materials – PDFS that are available on the Wayback machine of the Internet archive, since the website is no longer active – are definitely used for a pirate.
Torrent freak Even spoke to the creator of the font, who did not know whether the font used in the commercial was licensed, but found the situation as “fun”.
