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A rant on web font licenses

manuelmoreale.com

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Re: A rant on web font licenses

#111

Post by themodelplumber »

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…

Uhhh. What? When was this? That's weird to hear about, because I use them on a variety of monitored sites and haven't encountered any issues.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#112

Post by manuelmoreale »

rcarmo wrote: post #88

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.

I ended up doing the same on my site. A stack of OS fonts and I don’t have to worry about load times and all that.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#113

Post by CharlesW »

manuelmoreale wrote: post #60
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…

It's just normal price segmentation as applied to a creative work. The idea is that Nestlé can and should pay more for a typeface to be part of the voice of a brand than, say, a family-run bakery.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#114

Post by ghaff »

ntrz wrote: post #75
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/

This sounds like a typeface is not copyrightable but only because the mechanism for protection is different (patent system). So by doing what the GP suggests you wouldn't be violating copyright, but you may be in violation of the design patent on the typeface?

I'm not sure how common design patents are though. Relative to copyright, patents are much shorter duration and much more expensive and time-consuming to get whereas copyrights just happen (though you may want to register for greater protection--but that's still cheap and easy.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#115

Post by browningstreet »

bombcar wrote: post #92
browningstreet wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As an outsider, can you give an estimate on what it would cost to have a font designed from the ground up, and get full rights to all the files? Are we talking $25k, $250k, $2.5m?

There are so many technical details involved in specifying what a font might be that it's impossible. As an example: Western/Latin, or international? How many weights, sizes, styles, and variations? A western international font requires thousands of characters/ligatures/etc.

A WordPress site can be $500, $5K or $50K, depending on features, custom development, etc. Or more complicatedly, how much should a mobile app cost, and how much more should an iOS & Android mobile app cost, and how much more for a web version of some of the features..?

Here's one of the problems: in the days before webfonts, fonts were sold to designers who put those fonts in their toolbox. They stayed in that toolbox and the font files themselves weren't distributed around with every client or every delivery of collateral. Output was rendered, that render didn't include the font. The font face tag existed for years before font designers and font companies were willing to change their POV on delivering full webfont files to every browser and every browser cache that received the webfont. This was very different than before. A font sold to a designer was used by one person, a webfont installed on a website had a theoretically unlimited file distribution -- it's basically a default napster for fonts. (Or more controversially, commercial apps without an app store).

WOFF is just the exploitation of a bug to limit webfonts from desktop usage. It's a bit flip, and was easily altered. Iterations since have basically DRM firewalled desktop fonts from webfonts, but it's not very sophisticated.

I can tell you that Fortune 50 companies can pay low millions to license a commercial font for time, across all platforms.

It can take months to years to draw a font in all the characters/ligatures needed. Figure that's one designer (or an experienced designer, and a junior designer, working in tandem), working full-time, for 1-2 years, plus overhead, plus negotiations, plus specifications. How much do you think that's worth, or can be worth?

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#116

Post by ghaff »

a4isms wrote: post #94
ghaff wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

As an author from time to time, I am keenly sensitive to the dynamic where so many books could have been a single essay, but there's no money in essays. Unless you have something to sell, and presto, so many essays and blog posts are really advertisements for the author or their employer.

Things like business books in particular may benefit from a somewhat longer-form article that fleshes out stories, case studies, and examples. But most of them don't need to be 250+ page books.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#118

Post by crazygringo »

Slightly tangential, but here's something I've never understood: from what everyone says, font designs aren't copyrightable or protected in any way -- only their digital expression is.

So why aren't people producing identical open-source clones of expensive typefaces left and right?

If you write a script to render each letterform to a 10000x10000 pixel bitmap, and then run a decent bitmap-to-Bezier-curve pathtracing algorithm, you'll come up with your own independent digital representation based on the design alone.

Do this for every pair of characters and you'll get all the kerning data too. You won't get hinting, but these days with retina screens and Mac font rendering and 600 dpi printers you don't really need it anymore anyways. (Plus auto-hinting is often good enough on a low-DPI Windows screen, where it still does make a big difference.)

And even if there are license restrictions which technically prevent the licensee of a typeface from doing this... they can still produce the bitmaps, and then hand them off to a friend to do the digitization, who hasn't agreed to any terms at all.

It seems so easy to automate... is there a reason why this kind of "legal piracy" doesn't exist already? Is there something I'm missing?

(And I'm not talking about fonts that are designed to be intentionally similar but not perfectly identical to existing fonts, the way Arial mimicked Helvetica -- I'm talking about an exact clone.)

Edit: just to be clear, I'm not condoning this idea. It would probably destroy the font industry and make it impossible for font designers to make much of a living. I'm just curious why this seemingly inevitable outcome hasn't happened.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#119

Post by jstummbillig »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #67
lozenge wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Are you going to re kern and re layout the page when the font arrives? It makes me angry that this is even a sentence. Call me an old fart but I really felt that the web lost the thread when this became a concern. Websites shouldn't be magazines. Typography and layouts are nice to have, but the first priority should be information and content. But then the marketing people got involved and it had to become part of…

If you believe in an open web, there is no reasonable assumption that the stuff you value should receive any special consideration and all values should find the representation that people at large ascribe to them.

It's entirely reasonable for someone else to value different stuff than you do. If a vendor breaks a things, it's entirely reasonable for the customer to be frustrated by that in every case, no matter the thing.

What you (or I) think of the thing, is entirely beside the point when discussing its breakage, and the fact that people do not seem to get behind this causes too much frustration in the world.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#120

Post by [deleted] »

Springtime wrote: post #110
pc86 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK so you vectorize some commercial font then release it for free. Haven't you essentially just recreated the software, which is copyrighted? Haven't you still violated copyright just with extra steps? It seems like a distinction without a difference.

Apart from the glyphs (the character shapes) there's also the unique kerning data, ligatures/sequences of characters that produce other outputs, hinting data (for monitor displays) and such.

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