Iconic Anti-Piracy Ad May Have Used Pirated Font

It’s one of the most iconic PSAs for a certain breed of millennial who was downloading free movies and music in the mid-2000s. The anti-piracy ad “You Wouldn’t Steal a Car” is seared 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 have done a bit of digging.

The TV ad, which is available on YouTube, premiered in 2004 and if you haven’t seen it in a while, it’s worth taking a stroll down memory lane.

The ad featured animated graphics that read things like “you wouldn’t steal a car,” and “you wouldn’t steal a handbag,” and “you wouldn’t steal 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 pirated films is stealing.”

The font is so unique that the PSA is often parodied in a way that you can instantly spot, and it shows up as a meme on social media all the time.

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 behind the ad used that font.

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 Confidential because it was illegally cloned from that typeface, 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 sleuthing and quickly found a PDF from the campaign site with the font embedded,” social media user @rib explained.

Torrent Freak confirmed the font in the campaign materials is XBAND Rough, but there is still the possibility that the font used in the TV ads themselves were a licensed version, bought 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simple fact that the campaign materials—PDFs available on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine since the website is no longer active— were definitely using a pirated font is pretty funny by itself.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.”