[Tomte]

Well, that's one thing where he's right. Agree to disagree, I guess. ;-)

I had two online interactions with him that formed my opinion of him.

When I started being interested in typefaces, but not really able to discern one from another, I wrote him an email asking for the title of one or two books where I could see his FF Meta used for the body text. He's a busy man, so I only half expected him to reply, but I certainly didn't expect his condescending abusive email that he wouldn't help a lazy student with his homework. Great way to inspire people interested in your work!

The other time was in a type aficionado web forum where I mentioned that I had bought the Adobe Type Classics collection CD for much less than retail price (second hand). He accused me of piracy, again in pretty abusive manner.

Taken together with his holier-than-thou attitude, riling against "spec work" (https://www.nospec.com/), but then asking designers for spec work, because "it's for the UN" (and he was on the jury).

Or with his blatant lie in a Fontshop brochure I have on my shelf, claiming that there is virtually no intellectual property protection for fonts in Germany, and how it would have been impossibly expensive to register for type protection… but somehow a lot of hobbyists and small fish managed to do it.

Erik Spiekermann is a very important designer who did lots and lots of outstanding work, but I've found him to be a deeply unpleasant person.

[ktRolster]

claiming that there is virtually no intellectual property protection for fonts in Germany, and how it would have been impossibly expensive to register for type protection… but somehow a lot of hobbyists and small fish managed to do it.

What kind of protection is there? I've read that claim before.

[Tomte]

Back then there was the "Schriftzeichengesetz" which offered protection roughly similar to a design patent called "Geschmacksmuster" (but with its own registry). It has since been subsumed by the "Designgesetz".

Typeface protection has always been weaker in Germany than copyright protection, but it existed and exists.

As an aside: Fontshop used to claim at every opportunity that they had achieved a verdict in a lawsuit that gave fonts full copyright protection. That only worked because nobody on the forums and the web had ever seen the verdict. It wasn't secret, just behind a paywall of a legal database. A friend who's a lawyer retrieved it for me and I was much amused: The verdict said precisely the opposite!