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A rant on web font licenses

manuelmoreale.com

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Re: A rant on web font licenses

#51

Post by johnchristopher »

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…

This is ridiculous. HTML rendering is robust enough to work without CSS. A missing font should just be defaulted to serif or sans and that's it.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#52

Post by dspillett »

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?

As far as I know it is a quirk of the US copyright system, so may not apply the same globally.

First reasonable one that came up in a quick search: https://www.crowdspring.com/blog/font-law-licensing/#:~:text...).

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#53

Post by ghaff »

agos wrote: post #26
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.

my guess is that in the context of any project which is not super tiny, 1k$ is still very affordable

Yeah. If you're a big company and your designers/brand team are going for a specific look in your trade dress it may be worth it to license font(s) or even commission a new design. But with so much quality free stuff out there, it's hard to see it making sense for an individual or small business absent very unique requirements.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#54

Post by dsr_ »

capableweb wrote: post #25
tiffanyh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Oracle still does a lot of fuckery with their licenses. For example, you're prevented to share any benchmarks you've performed with their software. Not sure it's been proven in court that you could prevent anyone from sharing such information, but at least they're trying.

It's true.

Now, completely without benchmarks, I can tell you that my workplace has migrated from Oracle to Postgresql and performance is essentially the same: a few things were a little faster on Oracle, a few a little faster on PG. All revenue is directly or indirectly dependent on the database systems, which have been continuous for 20+ years: this is not a side-project.

PG administration is much, much faster. Starting an Oracle database always involves a wait similar to booting an elderly operating system. Starting a PG database is fast. Things that Oracle will want to up-charge you to an Enterprise Edition license for, PG has for free. Want to spin up a new machine? No need to negotiate a new license with PG. The cost of the Oracle license would routinely be so large that you need to buy awesome hardware to justify it. You can install PG on anything, and justify it.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#55

Post by goosedragons »

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.

It depends where you live. In the U.S it seems that typefaces can't have copyright protection, the font file ITSELF has copyright protection because it's a "computer program" for generating a typeface. In theory in the U.S you can take a typeface, create your own font file and use it as you see fit. Of course you might run into trouble and prove that you created your own font file. Other countries like Germany it seems DO give protection to typefaces so you can't just copy a typeface exactly.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#56

Post by ghaff »

luckylion wrote: post #49
ghaff wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There are. (With the caveat of look the same as some typeface. Not all the kerning and so forth may be identical.) Overpass is one example I'm familiar with off the top of my head but there are many. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpass_(typeface) Arial, notably, is also similar to (though distinguishable from with some letterforms) Helvetica.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#57

Post by jacobr1 »

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.

For any use case? You join a F500 company and now they can use it? What if you leave the company. It makes sense if you are freelancer and can use it with an arbitrary number of clients. But then does it transfer when those clients sites are bought/sold/merged/rebuilt ? The problem is that the use isn't restricted to you as a designer, but is distributed by your clients. That makes it different than a hammer, or an IDE.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#58

Post by pwinnski »

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.

I suspect, and I'm just guessing here, that they're fine with people like us using their fonts and maybe tip-toeing over whatever lines they've set, but they don't want, say, Coca-Cola using their typeface everywhere without forking over big bucks.

Were I a typeface designer, I'd like to think I'd say to myself, Self, what are the odds? Just charge $20 and rely on human decency. But I'm not a typeface designer, and my guess is that people who have tried that have found that human decency is thin on the ground among the subset of people who care about using typefaces on websites. But I'm just guessing.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#59

Post by lozenge »

johnchristopher wrote: post #51
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…

This is ridiculous. HTML rendering is robust enough to work without CSS. A missing font should just be defaulted to serif or sans and that's it.

It wasn't missing, it was slow.

Are you going to re kern and re layout the page when the font arrives? If you want to avoid that then you have to wait.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#60

Post by manuelmoreale »

rntz wrote: post #19

This situation is beginning to improve if you know where to look. There are several typeface designers who offer both low prices and reasonable licensing terms for their fonts; for instance, David Jonathan Ross ( https://djr.com/ ) has a "Font of the Month Club" that gives you one font per month at $6/month; even without membership you can get previous club fonts for $24; and the licensing terms are plain english. Ma…

I didn't know about DJR's Font of the Month Club. That's kinda neat.

> That said, usage tiers (where you must pay more if your website gets a certain # of views/month) seem ubiquitous. I think these are ok

Why do you think that's ok if you don't mind me asking? I worked on sites that used to generate lots of views but made 0 money because were not designed to be commercial projects. Why should I pay more money for a digital asset just because my site gets popular? It's not getting popular because of the font. Can you imagine if a CMS started charging you more money if your site becomes popular? What difference does it make to them? I just find it baffling.

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