A rant on web font licenses • Hacker News Board

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#81

Post by anononaut » Fri, Mar 10, 2023, 4:27 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #71

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…

This may be true but you are discounting how hard it is to create your own font from scratch. If one could do it, they probably wouldn't be in the market for a font license in the first place. The vast majority of website builders want/need a 1-click solution. Kinda like saying hey, every SaaS service out there can legally be rebuilt in-house with the same look and behavior, so why pay for any of them?

Seems to me like it wouldn't be that difficult to automate vectorizing whatever ttf.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#82

Post by mastax » Fri, Mar 10, 2023, 4:28 PM UTC

This could be a good place to have a traditional sales team.

Now, I usually hate that type of thing with a burning passion. The first thing I do when I see "contact us" where the price should be is look to find an alternative to buy. But it sounds like these types of sales could use some flexibility and the human touch is good for that. If they're the New York Times, charge them $250k a year, sure. If they're some blogger, give them a low flat rate for personal use, even if their blog gets lots of pageviews from Hacker News occasionally. Replace stringent pageview accounting with flexible pricing.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#83

Post by formerly_proven » Fri, Mar 10, 2023, 4:29 PM UTC

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 sounds like the awkward middle.

You're "too professional" to use system or OFL fonts, so you need to license a commercial font.

Yet you're too small to just outright buy the perpetual license or have your own customized font (like most bigger companies have).

So you end up with checks notes a pay-per-view font and all the issues associated with that. Which in turn gave you a rather unprofessionally broken website.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#84

Post by a4isms » Fri, Mar 10, 2023, 4:29 PM UTC

jacobr1 wrote: post #78

a4isms wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Part of the problem is that selling to small/medium business sucks, unless you can make it very transactional (the cheap model above, just scaled per-seat). Anything that needs to be hands on costs you almost as much in labor costs as big company ... without the high-price point to justify it. And especially in medium business range they often actually need _more_ support, since they are complex enough to have integr…

Part of the problem is that selling to small/medium business sucks, unless you can make it very transactional (the cheap model above, just scaled per-seat). Anything that needs to be hands on costs you almost as much in labor costs as big company ... without the high-price point to justify it.

My very first personal ISV "hustle" was a classified ad product for desktop publishing. I priced it at $750, and discovered that my cost of sales and support made this untenable. Now I know why small desktop publishers were doing classified ads by hand, and the really big companies had mainframe- and minicomputer-based systems costing five or six figures in the 80s and 90s.

Same dynamic, and all it took was my car being repossessed to make me realize there was something wrong with my business model.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#85

Post by ghaff » Fri, Mar 10, 2023, 4:31 PM UTC

a4isms wrote: post #45

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…

You see these kind of dynamics with a number of things.

Years ago, Philip Greenspun wrote a post noting that there was no real middle ground between a magazine article and a book. (This was in the context of the web maybe addressing this--though it mostly hasn't, longreads and things like that aside).

Something either fits into low single-digit thousands words length or it needs to be a 250+ page book. In some ways, shorted attention spans make this sort of thing even worse. We still have books but, in my day job, we've mostly found that the 3,000 word white papers we used to crank out have largely been replaced by blogs and blog series.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#86

Post by manuelmoreale » Fri, Mar 10, 2023, 4:31 PM UTC

seabass-labrax wrote: post #63

The Akzidenz-Grotesk typeface which is referred to in this article was first released in 1898, meaning that any patent or copyright claims on the original designs will have well and truly expired by now. However, specific digitisations of typefaces are subject to copyright individually, which is what allows such companies to charge royalties for their use. Whilst I couldn't find any truly free and open digitisations…

I only stumbled on that because a client of mine had his entire branding designed with Akzidenz and I'm in the process of redesigning his site. Two site actually. He'd have to pay more than €6k/year just for the webfont which is just stupid.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#87

Post by randomdata » Fri, Mar 10, 2023, 4:31 PM UTC

lozenge wrote: post #59

johnchristopher wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, you are going to give it a short window of time to deliver and if that elapses give up and render with what you have. You are going to keep trying to source the material in the background and if it eventually arrives give the user some non-intrusive feedback that they can choose to reload the page if they want to see it in its full form.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#88

Post by rcarmo » Fri, Mar 10, 2023, 4:31 PM UTC

I gave up on web fonts right from the start, really. My site uses Georgia with a set of CSS fallbacks to other serifs, plus the equivalent for monospace. But I've worked in places with licensed web fonts, and we would always host our own copies, plus we'd be extremely careful to minimize their use.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#89

Post by manuelmoreale » Fri, Mar 10, 2023, 4:33 PM UTC

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

I guess it depends 1) where you are in the world and 2) how you define "super tiny".

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#90

Post by manuelmoreale » Fri, Mar 10, 2023, 4:35 PM UTC

xhkkffbf wrote: post #61

Yeah, it can be a pain to pay font creators, but I expect that this web designer would be annoyed if his clients complained about paying him. Yes, some of the mechanisms can be fragile or troublesome, but I think that's the market's way of exploring possible options. The companies that came up with the idea of charging per the page view were probably responding to designers who didn't want to pay too much for small j…

I am not complaining about paying. I've been paying for a fonts.com sub since probably 2013 or 2014. I bought dozen of indidual fonts from small foundries. I have no problem paying for licenses.

My problem is the licenses themselves.