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A rant on web font licenses

manuelmoreale.com

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Re: A rant on web font licenses

#121

Post by donatj »

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

There are many cases of this, and it seems to be growing. See what happens when you surpass the Google Analytics free tier. Go from completely free to $150,000 overnight.

It was a real nightmare for us because since we license to institutions, our dollars-per-user is very low. We make very little money per-user compared to something like a shopping website. Basing that purely on number of users is nothing but trouble.

We had a similar situation with our prefered CI software. It goes from totally free to $6,000 per year once you hit a certain number of builds.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#122

Post by maxlybbert »

pc86 wrote: post #97
oldstrangers wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

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.

My understanding is that book publishers didn’t want the headache of knowing which printers were licensed for specific fonts, so they got a specific carveout for the shape of letters. So when they sell a book, they don’t have to worry about whether the printing company was licensed to resell the books they printed for the publisher.

The “you can have a copyright on the font software” aspect seems to be based on the idea that a particular font file is just as copyrightable as, say, a computer file of a company’s employee handbook describing uncopyrightable methods and systems ( https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf ).

If I pay Microsoft for a cool font, I don’t have to pay extra to print and distribute documents using it, but I can’t email the font file to my friends without paying Microsoft more. It’s not clear to me how that interacts with fonts embedded in PDF files, but I believe some companies charge more to license fonts so they can be embedded in PDFs. As far as creating a font file based on the physical shape if letters: you would end up with a file similar to the original, but I doubt it would be bit-for-bit identical. So you would have a reasonable explanation of how you got the similar file without violating anybody’s copyright.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#124

Post by manuelmoreale »

lancesells wrote: post #74

Let's be a little more real here. Very, very few font designers are getting rich off of their fonts. Since these are digital objects piracy is a big factor. The reason they have the page views in there are usually so giant corporations like Coca-Cola can't buy a $500 license and serve it up to millions. There are thousands of cheap or free options out there. This isn't a case where there's a limited supply.

But then giant corporations end up hiring font designers and they commission custom typefaces to get around the issue. So I don’t think this is a smart model. But the hell do I know.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#125

Post by vel0city »

abruzzi wrote: post #15
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".

This is the same line that made me scratch my head. I'm a non-network guy who has been stuck migrating our phone system from PRI to SIP, and every time I think I get it done, I have to buy another license from Cisco--that our resellers didn't tell us about at the beginning of the project. The latest issues is our voice gateways need a special security license to handle TLS. Outside that, cost per usage is one of the…

It absolutely astounds me the amount of licensing and related headaches companies are willing to deal with just so people can have desk phones with a name brand on them. It seems like absolute insanity to me, like we've devolved into the 1930s and AT&T still owns the phone inside your home.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#126

Post by bastawhiz »

KronisLV wrote: post #39
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/

No. It's not about the font loading, it's about the CSS import loading.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#127

Post by kjs3 »

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".

when you need a font for a small part of your website like headers

I can't get past thinking "why would you do that", especially for something you're having to pay for to use, and could break your web site if something goes wrong. That seems like the poster child for "hey, find an alternative, any alternative, that doesn't rely on a paid third party for something as trivial as how a header looks".

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#128

Post by kjs3 »

abruzzi wrote: post #15
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".

This is the same line that made me scratch my head. I'm a non-network guy who has been stuck migrating our phone system from PRI to SIP, and every time I think I get it done, I have to buy another license from Cisco--that our resellers didn't tell us about at the beginning of the project. The latest issues is our voice gateways need a special security license to handle TLS. Outside that, cost per usage is one of the…

Yeah, Cisco licensing is (and always has been) 'complicated'. But a lot of that is because customers like to say things like "I'm not going to use that feature, why am I paying for it". So Cisco has 500 licensing options for everything to maximize the amount it can extract. Perverse incentives and all that.

The other end of the spectrum is Microsoft that says "Here's what you get in an E3 license, take it or leave it, because trying to put together an enterprise license that only has what you want to pay for is 1) gonna be more expensive in the end, and 2) we make it as hard as possible to do that.".

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#129

Post by mschuster91 »

EmilyHughes wrote: post #65
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.

In Austria there was recently a case of a women sueing thousands of businesses for using google fonts on their website. The reasoning was that the fonts are hosted on google, so by visiting these sites they sent her IP to google without her knowing (what is meant is just the font download via the browser from google servers, nothing was actually "sent"). Apparently she visited these thousands of business websites one…

We had the same shit in Germany. The lawyer and the crying-wolf frontman are facing a criminal investigation and police seized 346.000€ in December last year [1].

> what is meant is just the font download via the browser from google servers, nothing was actually "sent"

Well, Google does get sent the IP address, and that is enough to be covered by GDPR regulation.

While I do think it's important the GDPR gets respected, I seriously think that enforcement needs a "severity" threshold for fines - and there needs to be some distinction between actually legitimate "necessary for functioning" data processing which would include stuff such as Google Fonts and between abuse of "necessary for functioning" data processing that includes all kinds of trackers.

[1] https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/hannover_weser-...

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#130

Post by mroche »

counttheforks wrote: post #28
buraktamturk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Article 8: "[...] the webfonts (= WOFF2 files) can be used on up to three websites owned by the license buyer. [...] read–write copies of my fonts can be embedded in word-processing documents that will be shared with fewer than 20 people."

This seems like the opposite of reasonable. Now some font license is expecting me to keep track of how many people a document gets shared with? Dystopian. What if I print it? Why is that allowed, but a digital file is not? How does that mesh with "Licensed users can use my fonts in any way they like"? Also what does it even mean with a read-only format? Every file format can be ripped and converted, even if there is…

> Also what does it even mean with a read-only format?

I assume documents like to-be-completed PDF's where an end-user may be filling in the blanks (Acrobat, DocuSign, etc).

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