Famous anti-piracy campaign may have used pirated font

How's that for a slice of tainted nostalgia?

Sky News reports that the "You wouldn't steal a car" campaign from the early 2000s used a pirated font on screen.

Debuting over 20 years ago on DVDs and throughout cinemas, in it, the act of pirating films was compared to thieving cars, handbags and TVs.

"Downloading pirated films is stealing. Stealing is against the law. Piracy. It's a crime," was the warning thrust upon viewers. To emphasise the point, the advert finished off with a sliding jail door sound effect.

However, it's been recently discovered that the font used by its makers was in fact pirated from a typeface designed by Just van Rossum.

Bluesky user 'Rib' extracted the fonts from one of the old campaign's PDFs, only to release the pirated font 'Xband-Rough' was present instead of van Rossum's licensed creation 'FF Confidential'.

In order to verify this find, Sky News replicated the process and came out with the same result.

Commenting on the matter, van Rossum himself revealed to the publication: "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."

Fans of The IT Crowd will fondly recall the cult sitcom's spoofing of the advert in series 2, when Roy and Moss venture out of the office to watch a film.

Its stern narrator warned: "You wouldn't steal a baby. You wouldn't shoot a policeman and then steal his helmet. You wouldn't go to the toilet in his helmet and then send it to the policeman's grieving widow... and then steal it again!"