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A rant on web font licenses

manuelmoreale.com

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Re: A rant on web font licenses

#41

Post by selivanovp »

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…

Not really, it depends on license agreement. For example today I integrated just another font to a customer’s website and license agreements had paragraphs about suing in case of attempts to copy/modify or any other way meddling with the font or its visual representation.

Obviously, you still can make a copy of any font and change it a little, but you can be sued for this.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#42

Post by HeavyFeather »

nullstyle wrote: post #30
jtbayly wrote: post #3

> Typefaces are, to the best of my knowledge, the only digital product that try to fuck you over with bullshit licenses. Oh, if only that were true.

Can you think of any more egregious examples? Fonts are by far the worst in my experience.

“Skin in-app purchases” are quite popular these days.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#43

Post by tonetheman »

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…

[dead]

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#44

Post by mytailorisrich »

manuelmoreale wrote: post #31
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.

It's classic market segmentation.

They'll be happy to let use the fonts for whatever you want but you'll have to pay more.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#45

Post by a4isms »

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".

> There's no middle ground between "here's your free font" and "pay me/us a lot of money".

This is a general problem in many businesses. Back in the early days of blogging, Joel Spolsky wrote an entire article about how there was basically no software that cost more than $1,000 and less than $75,000. This was more than a decade ago, the numbers today would be different because we care about LTV not sticker price, but the gap would still exist.[1]

Of course, heuristics like this are not strictly true, but the general shape of his argument is still correct: There are three kinds of monetization models for software: Free, cheap, and dear:

1. Free as in beer. Open source, etc.

2. Cheap. $10 – $1,000, sold to a very large number of people at a low price without a salesforce.

3. Dear. LTV of $75,000 – $1,000,000, sold to a handful of rich big companies using a team of slick salespeople that do six months of intense PowerPoint just to get one goddamn sale. The Oracle model.

Net result is that some products are sold to people to scratch their own itch, and some products are sold to businesses that can justify the ROI of spending a large amount of money, and between the two it is hard to find reasonable options.

We see this in all the products that start at a low price and solve a simple problem, like DropBox and 1Password. Then they pivot to "The Enterprise" and you are now talking subscriptions, seat licenses, and all sorts of fancy enterprise features to justify the price.

I used to see this in hotels when I travelled on business. When my clients were paying, they put me up in fairly luxurious hotels that charged me $3 for a room service coffee. When I was paying, I stayed in Motel6-type places that had free coffee in the room or at the end of the hall. I think everyone eventually offered free coffee in the room, but the last time i traveled there was a similar dynamic with WiFi: The naive would expect the cheapest accommodation to try to rent you internet access, but it was the other way around. "You have an expense account? Ha! Pay for WiFi!"

Same dynamic: If you are selling to business, you have to have the sales force, customer success organization, and features business want to buy (like back-end integration with business expense and planning systems). That all costs you money, which you recoup by charging an arm and a leg.

TL;DR: The moment you start selling to business, you are on a path to charging huge money for something that when sold to individuals, ought to be affordable.

[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-... "Camels and Rubber Duckies"

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#46

Post by somebodynew »

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?

A US federal court held that typeface designs cannot be copyrighted in Eltra Corp. v. Ringer in 1978. Federal regulations made this explicit in 37 CFR 202.1(e) in 1992. The government's explanation here [1] makes it explicit that typefaces are not subject to copyright protection, while fonts can be copyrighted as computer software.

[1] https://cdn.loc.gov/copyright/history/mls/ML-393.pdf

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#47

Post by oldstrangers »

torstenvl wrote: post #36
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…

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

...what?

The specific shapes and style of a font are not protected under copyright. It's only the software.

"A US federal court held that typeface designs cannot be copyrighted in Eltra Corp. v. Ringer in 1978. Federal regulations made this explicit in 37 CFR 202.1(e) in 1992. The government's explanation here [1] makes it explicit that typefaces are not subject to copyright protection, while fonts can be copyrighted as computer software." [1] https://cdn.loc.gov/copyright/history/mls/ML-393.pdf

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#48

Post by manuelmoreale »

browningstreet wrote: post #27
Plasmoid wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying a font ought to be on par with buying stock art. No necessary but if it makes you feel good, go for it.

Not a defense, but few outside fonts understand how hard fonts are to make, and to maintain, and to expand against feature-sets. It's more an artisanal world than a professional one, hence the craziness of some of the licensing schemes. Fonts are made and sold more like how the music world would be if music wasn't mainstream.

I was trained as a graphic designer. I have people in my circle who made fonts. I know how hard and time consuming it can be. And I wouldn't mind paying a fair price for them. It's the license the problem imo, not the price itself.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#49

Post by luckylion »

ghaff wrote: post #37
perk wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

If that holds up in court, why aren't there free/open source/cheaper versions of typefaces that look just like some font but are named differently?

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#50

Post by oldstrangers »

selivanovp wrote: post #41
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…

Not really, it depends on license agreement. For example today I integrated just another font to a customer’s website and license agreements had paragraphs about suing in case of attempts to copy/modify or any other way meddling with the font or its visual representation. Obviously, you still can make a copy of any font and change it a little, but you can be sued for this.

Yes, copying or modifying the actual software.

You're free to transform the shape and style of a vectorized font as much as you want.

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