IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT—N.D. Cal.: Font designers, beware: classification of registration matters, (Aug 6, 2025)

By Matthew Hersh, J.D.

A registration for a font’s data cannot support a lawsuit for infringement of the font’s accompanying computer program.

A font designer who registered her typeface as the sequential data representing that font—rather than as the computer program that generated that font—could not go forward with a lawsuit against a company that allegedly infringed her rights to the font because she did not have a valid registration to stand on, the federal court for San Jose, California has held. The court, in reconsidering an earlier ruling that would have allowed the copyright infringement claim to go forward, acknowledged that it had focused wrongly on whether the artist could have registered the work as a computer program rather than focusing on the fact that, for whatever reason, the artist did not (Laatz v. Zazzle, Inc., No. 5:22-cv-04844-BLF (N.D. Cal. Aug. 4, 2025)).

The lawsuit was brought by Nicky Laatz, the creator of a set of custom fonts entitled the Blooming Elegant Trio. The font designer came to believe that a company called Zazzle had used her font in ways that exceeded the license. Zazzle operates an online design platform that provides tools its users can use to design and order digital and physical products such as invitations, clothing, holiday cards, and mugs. Specifically, the font designer contended in her 2022 complaint, since amended, the design platform had exceeded the license terms by hosting the font on more than one server and by allowing multiple users of its site to use the font to make their own designs. The font designer alleged copyright and trademark infringement under federal law as well as breach of contract and multiple claims of fraud under California law.

The two parties have already battled a number of rounds in the California court. After the court denied Zazzle’s motion to dismiss the claims in 2023, Zazzle filed a counterclaim alleging invalidity of Laatz’s copyright registration. The court then denied Laatz’s motion for summary judgment later, denied Laatz’s motion to dismiss the counterclaim, and—most recently—partially granted and partially denied Zazzle’s motion for summary judgment.

The artist moved for reconsideration of the summary judgment decision, leading to this opinion.

The initial opinion. The court granted reconsideration of the summary judgment. The issue here rested on the narrow distinction between fonts, the data representing those fonts, and the software used to implement those fonts. Typefaces themselves—that is, the design of a font—in most cases cannot be copyrightable as works of visual art. However, most modern typefaces are actually not works of art per se but more like digital files—a series of bits and bytes, known as “font data,” that a computer program can read and interpret as a typeface. If a font designer has written out that font data herself—or if she has written the source code for computer software that can read and implement that font data—then she can register that font data or source code, respectively, as literary works.

In its initial opinion, the court found that the artist could not claim her work as font data itself because of the lack of human authorship. In creating her fonts, the court noted, the artist initially designed them using the aid of software from Adobe Illustrator and FontLab Studio. In order to create the material that she submitted to the Copyright Office as a deposit copy, the court noted, the artist used FontLab to convert her designs to a human-readable data form and then created PDF versions of those documents. As a result, the court noted, those PDF files themselves did not constitute human authorship because “the font data contained therein was created by FontLab, rather than [the artist].” Thus, the artist could not claim her registration was valid as font data.

However, the court did find that the artist had introduced sufficient evidence—enough to get to the jury in any case—over whether the registration was valid as a computer program. Here, the court noted, the artist had submitted evidence that she hand-created the software that implements the BE Trio fonts on a computer. “If credited by the jury,” the court noted, that software could qualify under the Compendium’s definition as “a scalable font output program that produces harmonious fonts consisting of hundreds of characters may require numerous decisions in drafting the instructions that drive a printer or other output device.” The claim could therefore go forward on this basis, the court held.

Reconsideration. On reconsideration, the court dismissed the entire copyright claim. The court stood by its earlier ruling that the artist had a plausible claim to the source code to the fonts. But the problem for the artist—a problem that the court failed to acknowledge the first time around, but recognized on reconsideration—was that the fonts had not been registered as source code. In fact, the court noted, the Copyright Office had on multiple occasions refused to accept the artist’s work as a software program, and instead accepted it for registration only as font data. Thus, whether or not the artist could have registered the work as source code, the fact remains that she did not—and that ended her claim.

“The Court incorrectly focused on Plaintiff’s argument that the BE Trio could be registered as ‘computer programs,’” the court acknowledged on reconsideration, “and missed Defendants’ argument that once the copyright registrations for font data were found invalid, it would be irrelevant whether BE was copyrightable as ‘computer programs.’” Without a valid registration, the court now recognized, the copyright case would have to come to an end.

The Case is No. 5:22-cv-04844-BLF.

Judge: Freeman, B.

Attorneys: Chad E. Deveaux (Bartko Pavia LLP) for Nicky Laatz. Rachel M. Kassabian (Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP) for Zazzle, Inc.

Companies: Zazzle, Inc.

Cases: Copyright TechnologyInternet CaliforniaNews