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A rant on web font licenses

manuelmoreale.com

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Re: A rant on web font licenses

#71

Post by paxys »

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?

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#72

Post by marcus_holmes »

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.

Not only the privacy issue, but the point where Google decides to charge for fonts, or drop it completely, and your website suddenly gets ugly. I always download the font and serve it myself.

Arguing with designers about fonts isn't fun. I totally understand how they want the pretty thing to fit in with their artistic vision, but the pain and cost of paid fonts is such a huge drag that I refuse to do it (especially if they want to install a tracker - that's an absolute no). It has got heated in the past.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#73

Post by cortesoft »

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?

No, because the text content is what is copyrighted, not the physical structure of the words on the page.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#74

Post by lancesells »

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.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#75

Post by ntrz »

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/

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?

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#76

Post by manuelmoreale »

jen20 wrote: post #64
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.

This kind of thing is why I block all web fonts. I don't want to wait, and I don't want the page to reflow while I'm reading it. The best way to do that is to use the system fonts (which also happen to be nice, on a Mac).

This is why—if I can—I design my sites using OS fonts that are honestly quite good.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#77

Post by tiffanyh »

dsr_ wrote: post #54
capableweb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Sta…

Does your database run on NVMe storage?

I ask because NVMe has neutralized a ton of performance differences across data related products.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#78

Post by jacobr1 »

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…

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 integration problems, but not big enough to have specialized personal to internally manage and deliver a project. It works for some products and services but not others.

One model you'll see though in this market segment and VARs and other channel providers. They'll have set of enterprise vendors they work with, but take on the sales and service aspect themselves. So while it might not make sense to have dedicated sales and customer success for a $5k piece of software - if you are effectively bundling 10 of these from different vendors + profserv, a $100k/deal starts making sense of the VARs, and offloads the costs from the vendors who are then just giving bulk pricing to the channel.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#79

Post by Springtime »

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…

This was one of the motivations for ITC's founding decades ago (as per my recollection of one of Herb Lubalin's old U&lc magazine pieces) since font reproductions under different names was rampant as it was increasingly easier to reproduce (albeit most of the time with some artifacts*) and since they wanted to encourage typeface designers to still create new typefaces and pay them decently.

* I distinctly remember ads in the magazine highlighting the 'authentic' fonts vs the artifacts of reproduced imitations. This was before digitization made it even more trivial. I should mention scans of these old U&lc magazines were made available in PDF form several years ago and are well worth reading (particularly the earliest issues Lubalin was involved with before his passing).

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#80

Post by oldstrangers »

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?

I'm not arguing for creating your own font. I'm just expressing how silly the law is. Of all the things I thought a copyright law would protect, I'd assume it would be the actual artistic visualization of a font, and not the software that it runs on.
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