Kochi font (東風フォント) was a font development project to build free replacements of proprietary fonts such as MS Gothic or MS Mincho, developed by Yasuyuki Furukawa (古川 泰之). The project consisted of Kochi Gothic and Kochi Mincho fonts. It was released in the public domain.
Plagiarism controversy
The Kochi Mincho font began as an outline version of a raster font known as Watanabe (渡邊). This version was deprecated in 2003 after it was discovered by Hiroki Kanou, one of the developers, that Watanabe was largely copied from a commercial font, TypeBank Mincho-M; while it was not clear that any law was being broken, the developers were not interested in working with plagiarised material.
While Hitachi, who claimed to own the TypeBank font, had announced that they were willing to permit its restricted use in Linux systems, the direction preferred was to discontinue the old Kochi fonts and replace them with new versions that did not contain any of the plagiarised characters. The new font family was called Kochi-substitute: it retained the old Kochi Gothic and Kochi Mincho font names, but the file names were changed to kochi-gothic-subst.ttf and kochi-mincho-subst.ttf, respectively.
Kochi-Substitute is currently a part of the efont project, maintained by Hiroki Kanou.