[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!