In the most delicious irony imaginable, the notorious early 2000s ‘You wouldn’t steal a car’ anti-piracy campaign may have used an ‘illegal’ font

There’s an infamous anti-piracy advertisement from back in 2004 that online oldsters will immediately recognize: “You wouldn’t steal a car,” it begins, complete with shakycam footage of some sketchy looking dude popping a lock, before rolling into various other types of theft and eventually equating it all with downloading a copy of Shrek 2. The ad makes it dramatically clear: Stealing Shrek will get you hard time in the slam when you’re inevitably busted for your criminal ways.

You’ve likely seen this but just in case, let me be perfectly clear: This is not parody.

It was, and is, overwrought and silly, and so of course it inspired numerous parodies and memes: The British comedy series The IT Crowd did a particularly good one a few years after the original aired—in fact the old URL, piracyisacrime.com, now directs to The IT Crowd Clip on YouTube. I urge you to watch it. The ad itself was only around for a short time, but “you wouldn’t download a car” has endured in shitpost form for decades; it’s practically embedded in the fabric of the internet at this point.

(Also, it turns out that some of you absolutely would download a car if you could.)

But as good as many of these parodies are, none are as ridiculous (and funny) as the recent discovery that the world’s best-known anti-piracy ad may have used a pirated font.

The distinctive font used in the ad appears to be FF Confidential, created by Just van Rossum in 1992. But there’s another font called XBand Rough that’s virtually identical, and when journalist Melissa Lewis reached out to van Rossum about it, he told her XBand Rough is an “illegal clone” of FF Confidential.

This is where it gets interesting. After all this, another Bluesky user named Rib used the FontForge tool on a PDF file from the old anti-piracy campaign, available via the Wayback Machine, and discovered the file in question uses the XBand Rough font—the clone.

I checked it myself, and sure enough the embedded font in the PDF comes up as XBand Rough, and not FF Confidential.

To be clear, this isn’t proof of some deeply-buried wrongdoing—it’s entirely possible the campaign’s graphic designers had no clue the font was a clone of an existing work. But the irony of a hard-ass anti-piracy campaign making use of an unlicensed knockoff font, well, it’s hard to overlook. Luckily, van Rossum, the creator of the FF Confidential font the campaign didn’t use, thinks it’s all very funny.

“I knew my font was used for the campaign and that a pirated clone named XBand Rough existed,” van Rossum told TorrentFreak. “I did not know that the campaign used XBand Rough and not FF Confidential, though. So this fact is new to me, and I find it hilarious.” He also said he has no intention of pursuing the matter further.