“You wouldn’t steal a car” advert may have used pirated font, investigation claims

A font used in a famous anti-piracy campaign from the early ’00s was allegedly also pirated.

The ad, which appeared in cinemas and on DVDs around the world from 2004, compared pirating films to stealing cars, handbags and televisions, telling viewers: “You wouldn’t steal a car”.

But now it has been suggested that the font used in the campaign was also apparently pirated from a typeface created by designer Just van Rossum in 1992.

Bluesky user Rib extracted the fonts used in one of the campaign’s old PDFs and discovered the pirated font Xband-Rough was used instead of Mr van Rossum’s licensed font FF Confidential.

Whether the "You wouldn't steal a car" anti-piracy campaign stole the music is up for debate, but I found today that the font they used throughout was a pirated clone (XBAND Rough) of a real font (FF Confidential).

— Rib (@rib.gay) 2025-04-23T16:15:17.281Z

According to an investigation by Sky News, the news organisation was able to replicate this process and came up with the same results.

Despite that, there is no evidence to suggest that the campaign’s designers were aware that the font had been pirated, as copies of it were being widely shared at the time.

“I had known about the ‘illegal clone’ of my font before, but I didn’t know that that was the one used in the campaign,” Rossum told Sky News. “The campaign has always had the wrong tone, which (to me) explains the level of fun that has been had at its expense. The irony of it having used a pirated font is just precious.”

The adverts also went on to spawn a host of spoofs for years afterwards.

In fact, if you try to go to the campaign’s official URL, you will be redirected to the most famous spoof, a sketch in the sitcom The IT Crowd.

One of the organisations behind the adverts, the UK’s anti-piracy agency FACT, declined to comment on the findings, telling NME the campaign pre-dated anyone currently working at the organisation.

Two of the other organisations, America’s Motion Picture Association and the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore, are yet to publicly comment on the findings.

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