Adobe Systems, Inc. v. Southern Software, Inc.  Adobe Systems, Inc. v. Southern Software, Inc. was a case in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California regarding the copyrightability of digitized typefaces (computer fonts). The case is notable since typeface designs in general are not protected under United States copyright law, as determined in "Eltra Corp. v. Ringer". Since that case, the United States Copyright Office has published policy decisions acknowledging the registration of computer programs that generate typefaces. In this case, the court held that Adobe's Utopia font was protectable under copyright and Southern Software, Inc.'s Veracity font was substantially similar and infringing. In 1979, The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held in "Eltra Corp. v. Ringer" that typefaces are industrial designs which cannot exist independently as works of art. In 1988, the U.S. Copyright Office published a policy decision specifically addressing attempts to register fonts. The Copyright Office stated that the representation of a glyph as pixels was not protectable expression, since the raw source typeface design was not protectable, and no original authorship occurred in the conversion process. The policy decision described the digitization of typefaces as bitmap images, which was the leading format for fonts at the time. A limitation of this format is that different sizes of the font must have different bitmap representations. Having received applications to register copyrights for computer programs that generated typefaces using "typeface in digitized form", the Copyright Office revisited the 1988 Policy Decision in 1992. The Office was concerned that the claims indicated a significant technological advance since the previous policy decision. One advance was scalable font representations (Bézier curves). This format can output a font at any resolution, and stores its data as control points rather than pixels. The Office acknowledged that these fonts might involve original computer instructions to generate typefaces, and thus be protectable as computer programs, but ended saying that "The scope of the copyright will be, as in the past, a matter for the courts to determine." Adobe filed suit against Southern Software in multiple complaints between 1995 and 1997. Adobe's allegations were:  Adobe's fonts under dispute were created from previously digitized font files in bitmap form. 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.