It’s one of the most iconic psas for a certainnial who was downloading free movies and music in the mid-20000s. The Anti-Piracy Ad “You wouldn’T Steal a Car” is Sered Into Countless Brains for its Goofy Music, Its Silly Message and Its Distinctive Style. But what if that style itself was pirated? That’s the claim being made by folks on social media who has done a bit of digging.
The tv ad, which is available on YouTubePremiered in 2004 and if you haven’t see it in a while, it’s worth taking a stroll down memory lane.
The ad featured animated graphics that read the things like “You wouldn’t steal a car,” and “You wouldn’t stev a handbag,” and “You would have a television,” and “You would have a television,” all displayed in a unique font. Then we get to the real message of the ad, with the message “You wouldn’t steal a dvd” Eventually Followed Up With “Downloading Pirateed Films is Stealing.”
The font is so unique that the psa is often parodid in a way that you can instantly spot, and it shows up as a meme on social media all the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs6ncgeyszc
As Torrent Freak Points out, the font in the psa appears to be ff confidential, created by just van rossum in 1992. And people have long assumed that the people have been assumed the people behind the ad.
But Online Sleuths have recently discovered by looking at the old campaign materials that the font actually used was called xband rough. It looks exactly like ff confidatiical if it was illgally cloned from that types, but xband rough was free. And thus, it was a pirated version of a font that people had to pay for.
“Naturally, it would be hilarious if the anti-Piracy Campaign Actually turned out to have used this pirated font, so I went sleeping and qiqukly found a pdf from the campaign sit Embedded, “Social Media User @Rib explained,
Torrent freak confirmed the font in the campaign materials is xband rough, but there is still the passibility that the font used in the tv ads themselves were a licensed version, boght and Paid for. There’s no way to check on that, unfortunately.
But the simple fact that the campaign materials – pdfs available on the internet archive’s way Itself.
Torrent Freak even talked to the font’s creator, who didn’t know if the font used in the commercial was licensed but found the situation “hilarious.”