Adobe's fonts under dispute were created from previously digitized font files in bitmap form.
[1] Such bitmap images are not protectable under copyright, as addressed by the 1988 Policy Decision. These were imported into a program where an Adobe editor dragged control points to best match the outline of the bitmap image. When finished, these control points were translated into computer instructions to create the final font file.
Paul King, the sole employee of Southern Software, Inc. altered Adobe's Utopia Font using the commercially available tools FontMonger and Fontographer. He produced three new fonts which differed trivially from the original font. These font editing programs extracted the control points from Adobe's font files and made them available for manipulation and saving to a new font file. He had scaled the coordinates of the fonts by 101% on the vertical axis in order to slightly change the fonts. Adobe also alleged that King modified the font editing tools in order to remove Adobe's copyright notices. In total, King was accused of infringing Adobe's copyrights on more than 1100 fonts.
