If various industry trade bodies are to be believed, the world is under siege by pirates. The Business Software Alliance warns that nine out of ten pieces of software used in Zimbabwe are illegal copies. The Federation Against Copyright Theft says the illicit trade in pirated movies in the UK is worth £270 million each year. And this week the IFPI, a music industry lobbying group, is attacking Yahoo! China for operating an unauthorised music download service. China’s music piracy problem, according to the IFPI, costs musicians $400 million annually.

Most of us greet these jarring figures with a cold collective shrug. So what if Microsoft and Adobe have grievances with Robert Mugabe’s regime over bogus versions of Windows and Acrobat circulating on the streets of Harare? When I worked for Reuters, earnest BSA officials would point out to me the growing piracy problem in land-locked Zimbabwe every year, and every year I would lose my patience with them and question their methodology. The UN’s World Food Programme can barely come to grips with the number of sick and dying in Zimbabwe. How can the BSA assess the software piracy problem with any hope of precision?

I agree with the BSA that software piracy is a big problem. And, I believe, the public badly needs a lesson in respecting copyright and intellectual property protections. Then, of course, we need to rewrite copyright laws to reflect the reality of a digital world, but that’s years away. In the meantime, the protectionists at FACT, IFPI, BSA, etc, are losing the battle for the hearts and minds of everyday computer users, with their mind-boggling numbers and finger-wagging. My advice: put away the bullhorns and sticks and draw a lesson in strategy from the typeface industry.

The typeface industry, it may surprise you to learn, has a piracy problem too. Tens of thousands of licensed fonts are circulating online, on hard drives, in company networks and very likely on letterheads in an unauthorised fashion. Yep, copyright protections can even extend to the elegant flourish of a Z or the curvature of a 9. You probably have scores of such fonts on your computer and may even have used them on your website. If you are in possession of these fonts, you should be paying a licensing fee to the creator, particularly if you intend to use the font for your personal publishing purposes.

"This is something very serious. Designers can spend hundreds of hours working on a set of fonts. Like any industry anywhere, we have to protect this IP," says Julie Strawson, the director of marketing for Monotype Imaging, a Boston-based firm with a long history in the typographical industry dating back to the hot metal printing press days. "A lot of organisations just take fonts for granted."

And font abuse, according to Ms Strawson, is at record levels. When auditing companies’ networks, Monotype finds, on average, thousands of fonts. Typically 40 per cent of these fonts carry a license the company is not paying for. Recently, London-based Campden Publishing was busted for using £80,000 worth of licensed fonts without paying. (It should be noted that a tip-off to the BSA triggered the bust).

Ms Strawson played down the Campden incident, insisting that the industry doesn’t want to single out offenders, but instead wants to alert computer users to an abuse problem they no doubt are unaware of.

After all, a majority – if not, all – of the fonts may have been obtained innocently. "A lot of fonts creep in from documents and find their way onto a network," she explained.

The internet has become a tremendous vehicle for illicitly acquiring licensed fonts, driven in particular by the personal publishing revolution brought on by blogs. The reality is a name-and-shame strategy would do little good, resulting only in a list of millions of offenders. "Our approach is not the hard-line approach," she says. "We are working on educating people who are no doubt oblivious to this issue in the first place."

If you want to check how many different fonts are on your computer system, click here. And it can be done anonymously. Perhaps Robert Mugabe’s speechwriter should give it a whirl.

Bernhard Warner is a former Reuters internet correspondent in Europe and senior editor for The Industry Standard Europe. He writes about technology, the internet and media industries and can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com

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