Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A rant on web font licenses

manuelmoreale.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 169 posts

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#31

Post by manuelmoreale »

nathell wrote: post #2

I like Matthew Butterick’s approach. He sells whole families at a time (on a pay-once basis), offers discounts if you get the whole library, and the license is short, to the point, and reasonable: https://mbtype.com/license/

It's a lot better than most, that's for sure. But I still don't understand why they have all these arbitrary usage rules like the maximum of three websites. I look at fonts like tools. As a dev who also does design I should be able to buy it once and have it available as a tool at my disposal.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#32

Post by huhtenberg »

ckdot2 wrote: post #12

In my opinion in most cases it's neither worth the price nor worth the effort to use paid fonts on a website. There's a huge amount of fonts for free on Google Fonts. Also, yoou are allowed to host them on your own server, so there's no privacy issue.

Fun fact - versions that you can download from GF for self-hosting aren't necessarily what GF actually serves out.

Got burned by this with Noto Sans when the self-hosted version had different x-height at a certain text size and looked notably worse than the one of GF service.

Caveat emptor.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#34

Post by dahdum »

tiffanyh wrote: post #13
conradfr wrote: post #4

> Typefaces are, to the best of my knowledge, the only digital product that try to fuck you over with bullshit licenses Has Oracle disappeared? The article is kind of true though, especially when you need a font for a small part of your website like headers, the licence often make it not worth it if you're not a company. There's no middle ground between "here's your free font" and "pay me/us a lot of money".

Oracle will sell you a perpetual license that you own forever. Most foundries won't do that for fonts (at least for web).

True, but web fonts don’t have frequent critical patches. You can’t expect to use Oracle software without paying ever increasing maintenance in perpetuity. Well, maybe some, but certainly not any database products.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#35

Post by c0l0 »

I think it's often a mistake to insist on a third-party font if an environment-/OS-native font family does a good enough job already - it's just more data transferred, text often "jumping" around when the font data has finally been processed and is ready to render, and (often, in real-world use) data needlessly exfiltrated to some font-hosting CDN operator.

The only third-party font I'd consider using (for reasons of superior accessibility, not style) on websites and the like is the [Atkinson Hyperlegible Font](https://brailleinstitute.org/freefont), which is free to use and redistribute.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#36

Post by torstenvl »

oldstrangers wrote: post #20

The silliest thing I learned years ago was that the license only applies to the "software" of the font. In the US, you can literally go and vectorize any font in the world and do whatever you want with it. "In the United States, the shapes of typefaces are not eligible for copyright, though the shapes may be protected by design patent (although these are rarely applied for, the first US design patent ever awarded was…

IANAIPL but IAAL and I'm skeptical of this, at least in the U.S. There's nothing in title 17 AFAIK that explicitly allows this, and it is quite different from how copyright works for all other categories of works.

I'd be interested in a citation if you have one.

Do you think you could vectorize all the pages in a book and magically get around the copyright?

EDIT: Thank you for providing the citation. Interesting! I'm not sure I agree with the court's analysis in ELTRA Corp., but the codification in the CFR obviates any difference of opinion on the matter.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#37

Post by ghaff »

perk wrote: post #23
oldstrangers wrote: post #20

The silliest thing I learned years ago was that the license only applies to the "software" of the font. In the US, you can literally go and vectorize any font in the world and do whatever you want with it. "In the United States, the shapes of typefaces are not eligible for copyright, though the shapes may be protected by design patent (although these are rarely applied for, the first US design patent ever awarded was…

I've read something along this lines before, but cannot find a good source for it. Do you have one?

Basically fonts are copyrightable but typefaces are not. Font names are also trademarkable. https://glarts.org/font-and-typeface-legal-tip-sheet/

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#38

Post by nluken »

naillo wrote: post #14

Fonts still being able to make money makes me think that all this AI art generation probably won't put artists out of a job. Surely we have enough fonts at this point to be a 'solved' problem, and yet somehow people keep paying for it.

Typography is a highly specialized field that requires a lot of semantic knowledge about how letters interact to execute well. It's a much harder problem (for humans and computers) than people realize.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#39

Post by KronisLV »

matteason wrote: post #17

MyFonts' licensing system effectively took down our entire website recently. We have a font licenced for some number of pageviews (250,000 or whatever), and they track that via an @import in the CSS they give you which points to a URL on a subdomain of myfonts.net. Except they changed their licensing mechanism, didn't tell their customers and broke the subdomain the @import was hitting. It didn't fail immediately, ju…

Wouldn't some of the font-display options be helpful for this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/...

Here's some more information: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/font-display/

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#40

Post by manuelmoreale »

jorgesborges wrote: post #8

Purchasing a font license for a personal website is an insane and sadistic extravagance, like pissing away $200 on a t-shirt.

Well, it depends. I bought font for personal projects that were a one time 20$ purchase which I don't mind especially if i'm supporting young designers. The reason why I have to deal with web fonts it's because graphic designers usually design websites using typefaces without even bothering checking the webfont license first and then is up to me to explain the extra costs to clients.
Post reply on HN