Internet sleuths and Sky News have teamed up to uncover the iconic anti-piracy ads’ accidentally dubious history.
If you ever bought (or, we suppose, stole) a DVD in 2004, you’ll be very familiar with a certain anti-piracy advert.
Opening with the much-parodied assertion that “you wouldn’t steal a car” set to some very aggressive backing music, it now transpires that the campaign’s creators may have accidentally resorted to, er, piracy, with regard to its infamous font.
According to Bluesky user Rib (and validated by Sky News), code analysis of an old PDF distributed by the organisation lists the famous typeface as Xband-Rough – an illegal copy of licensed font FF Confidential.
The two fonts are almost identical, and it’s unlikely anyone on the campaign was aware they were using the wrong one – the UK’s Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) declined to comment on the issue to Sky News, noting that the campaign pre-dated anyone now working at the organisation.
The advert was a curiously international co-production between the FACT, the Motion Picture Association of America (now the MPA) and the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore.
It intercut shaky footage of a teenager downloading a film and women attempting to buy bootleg DVDs with clips of a man committing various property-based crimes, and became a mainstay of home video menus and cinema trips from 2004-2008. An academic study on behavioural economics published in 2022 found that the campaign may actually have increased piracy rates by making piracy seem more common, and therefore more socially acceptable, than it actually was.
Original font creator Just van Rossum told Sky News: “I had known about the “illegal clone” of my font before, but I didn’t know that that was the one used in the campaign.
“The campaign has always had the wrong tone, which (to me) explains the level of fun that has been had at its expense. The irony of it having used a pirated font is just precious.”
