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 for a typeface)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...
Also from somebodynew:
"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 it explicit that typefaces are not subject to copyright protection, while fonts can be copyrighted as computer software."
[1] https://cdn.loc.gov/copyright/history/mls/ML-393.pdf
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 not sure I agree with the court's analysis in ELTRA Corp., but the codification in the CFR obviates any difference of opinion on the matter.
"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 it explicit that typefaces are not subject to copyright protection, while fonts can be copyrighted as computer software."
[1] https://cdn.loc.gov/copyright/history/mls/ML-393.pdf
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?
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.
You can't create a usable font using vectors. Just not how it works. You could vectorize a brand name in a font of your choice without repercussion though.
And yes, people make 'clones' of fonts all the time that are ever so slightly different (Arial).
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.
Usually people don't just vectorize the font and rerelease it without any modifications. Usually there's some small stylistic changes made, which most people wouldn't notice, but type designers are attuned to. So then it's a substantive change.
I think this is the logic behind the legal decision: that the glyphs put constraints on things enough that it would be difficult to navigate legally in many cases.
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).
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.
I might be wrong but I think the issue is that there are typeface extremely similar to each other and so it would be hard to figure out when something is actually a new design.
Arial/Helvetica is the classic example.
Personally, I wouldn’t even know how to approach this issue from a legal standpoint.
But fonts are more than just typeface vectors. For example, it's code can cause any conceivable string of characters to look different than simply rendering each glyph immediately next to each other; sometimes it's kerning tweaks, sometimes combinations get replaced with completely different glyphs (like "f" and "i" next to each other often having an undotted "i": look closely at "fi" depending on the font).
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.
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 it explicit that typefaces are not subject to copyright protection, while fonts can be copyrighted as computer software.
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.
Yeah, agreed that it seems unlikely to be a problem for most typefaces. I just think it's a bit misleading to suggest it's guaranteed to unburden the typeface of any and all 'intellectual property' protections ("In the US, you can literally go and vectorize any font in the world and do whatever you want with it").
And, of course, I can sue you for copying my typeface even if I'll probably lose in court and you probably don't want to spend at least 5 figures in lawyers to defend your open source typeface design.
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.
There are: for quite a famous example see Monotype's Arial which is effectively free for Windows/Office users and is mostly indistinguishable from Helvetica by people who are not typography experts.
Most free clones are not as good in various ways, and good clones that are charged for probably get earn their creators a letter from a foundry's legal team that makes them decide that the cost (time and money) of defending their position (even though they should eventually win) is not worth it.
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, just kept trying to load for ages, and so rendering was blocked and our pages didn't load. That was pretty frustrating.
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.
> 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 the "brand experience". Just give me a HTML table with your menu items, description, and prices. Or even better just the data in an XML file and I can read it without JavaScript and animations and awkward navigation patterns.
Why though? We’re in 2023 and magazines got out of print to move to the web. Telling literal magazines “no, you shouldn’t exist here” is pretty harsh.
But I’ll grant you the mental image is powerful. I imagine you going to a restaurant and shouting “what’s with the decorum ? And that background music ? and all this space between tables ? this should be a warehouse with everyone sitting on the floor with the lasagna served in tupperwares ”
I'm happy to chose to have an experience, frankly I enjoy fine dining. But I refuse to go if I can't get access to the prices beforehand. There is a difference between an authentic experience (say the opera) and using it as a manipulative tactic. Do not get between me and the information. If I call an ask how much the lobster bisque is, don't tell me to hold while they get ahold of someone who can say it with a French accent. This is about empowering the consumer.
And even in a traditional magazine the design should never take precedence over the content. (...waiting for the Marshall McLuhan apologist to show up). I mean there is a reason that CSS is not necessary to render HTML or why Progressive Enhancement was a real movement.
This is about what they want to deliver the customer and wether the customer chooses to receive it or not. Some restaurants will not explain you over the phone how much any single dish costs, and they might not want you or me as their customer.
Some won’t have a price for the lobster in the first place, and they’ll tell you how much to pay after you spent the night there. And some absolutely not fancy restaurants won’t even know if there will be lobster the day you go there nor how much they’ll price it.
But in any of these cases, it’s an experience the customer chooses. You can choose to never deal with a place that won’t let you spreadsheet your dinner cost beforehand, or never go to a site that takes more than 1s to fully load, or never allow a site to set a custom font etc.
You’re free to hang up while they go fetch a French accent guy. In the meantime, some other customers already knew the prices but still called just to hear the French accent guy talk to them for 5 minutes and will wait however long to get their fix.
So yes, I’m all for varied and clunky experiences as long as it’s a two way street and no scamming is involved. The web is wide enough to give some small place to all of it.
Ａ different angle: when moving from paper to the web, a lot was lost and a lot was gained. As you point out information has been the core pillar of the web since the dawn of it, and we thrived with that mindset.
But at some point I think we need to find a way to bring onboard part of what was left aside, all the stuff were information was not the primary value. Sure not all of it was great, but there should be technical ways to guarantee it’s delivered as fast as it can and as complete as the makers wishes.
I’m imagining a small kid opening the next Lego movie promotion site, and sure they’ll want to know when and where they can watch it, but the first step is to bring them in-universe and persuade them they want to watch the movie in the first place. Bare naked Arial text with no background for 4s won’t help in that respect, could probably be worse than a blank loading page for some kids, so the question really is how to make the actual intended experience work better (how do we solve the font licensing problem? Or how do we make sure to deliver a French Accent menu over the phone without the wait time, to get back to your analogy).
Lets say instead of telling you to hold while they get a person with a french accent on the phone, they only pay people with french accents to answer the phone. There are a little less people with french accents working at the restaurant, but still enough to get the phone answered with only a slight delay compared to a more traditional restaurant phone line. There's also a special 'no fuss' mode on your phone, where you can just chat with the phones default voice assistant. There's no waiting time, and the voice assistant fetches the correct data from the restaurants website and presents it conversationally.
Of course, if all of the people with french accents called in sick for work, the phone might end up unanswered. The problem should be able to be fixed, though, by having some sort of fallback mechanism to people with italian accents.
> The cook is busy fixing the Sonos system, your lasagna will have to wait.
Oh but I have been out of that restaurant 5 minutes after I noticed nobody was doing anything related to food. They don't need to microwave the lasagna.
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.
I think a better approach is to use the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) to create and force websites to provide the relevant information in a standardised and accessible formats. You can do what you want, but substance before style.
I'm not talking about a brand experience necessarily. Just a mixture of paragraphs and images can cause the issue of where to put the scroll position after the text has changed size. Then add tables, different ways to layout images, etc.
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).
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.
> 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 most common cost metrics I've seen--sure if its SaaS it seems directly related, but this is for on-prem licensing--I get the exact same application, only I'm licensed by how much I use it, like the authors font licensing complaint.
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.".
> Yeah, Cisco licensing is (and always has been) ‘complicated’.
Some of this, too, is due to Cisco’s longevity in the market, the sheer number of product lines they’ve gone through, and the number of companies they’ve absorbed.
You buy a company, you can’t just cancel all the existing licenses for those products, so you have to keep those licensing systems and pricing packages around for those customers that keep renewing year after year. Only after a while, it becomes more trouble than it’s worth to integrate those into your existing licensing packages (especially if you’re figuring you’ll get around to EoLing that stuff when no one’s using it anymore), so they just stick around forever.
You kill off a product line and replace it with something, existing customers say, “Great, I’ll buy the new thing with the options I had on the old one”. Except those don’t map cleanly, so now you’re developing odd licensing packages for people who want the Super-Duper Routing 9000 but only with the same leather trim and manual shifter they had on the Routing 8000. If the customer is large enough you’ll bend for them, especially the big national ones with clauses in their contracts that require the forfeiture of dragon-blanching amounts of gold if you ever can’t sell them exactly what they bought last year.
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.
In my defense, I did say "to the best of my knowledge" :)
I'm just a designer/developer so I don't have deep knowledge of most of the tech world and I'm sure there are some crazy stories out there I am unaware of. But as I said, I'd be more than happy to hear them.
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".
That's true. But also, it seems absurd to me that people care enough about fonts to pay money for them. To me, there are only 5 fonts in the world:
* any Serif font (Times, etc, they all look the same except for 1-pixel differences)
* any Sans serif font (Arial, Helvetica, it's all the same thing)
* Serif monospaced (Courier)
* Sans serif monospaced (Consolas etc)
* Silly unreadable fonts like Papyrus. Sure, technically, there are lots of these, and they do look different, but there's no reason to use one of these, unless you just want to make your site difficult to read.
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.
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.
Not only that but Postgres doesn't take two days to install properly. (Admittedly I'm talking a full from scratch Red Hat server with Oracle DB, Oracle managed data disks and Apex, bit still.)
True, but web fonts don’t have frequent critical patches. You can’t expect to use Oracle software without paying ever increasing maintenance in perpetuity. Well, maybe some, but certainly not any database products.
I'm not in that kind of world so I'm not familiar with Oracle business practices. And I agree, there's usually no middle ground and it's both annoying and bizarre.
> 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 the gap would still exist.[1]
Of course, heuristics like this are not strictly true, but the general shape of his argument is still correct: There are three kinds of monetization models for software: Free, cheap, and dear:
1. Free as in beer. Open source, etc.
2. Cheap. $10 – $1,000, sold to a very large number of people at a low price without a salesforce.
3. Dear. LTV of $75,000 – $1,000,000, sold to a handful of rich big companies using a team of slick salespeople that do six months of intense PowerPoint just to get one goddamn sale. The Oracle model.
Net result is that some products are sold to people to scratch their own itch, and some products are sold to businesses that can justify the ROI of spending a large amount of money, and between the two it is hard to find reasonable options.
We see this in all the products that start at a low price and solve a simple problem, like DropBox and 1Password. Then they pivot to "The Enterprise" and you are now talking subscriptions, seat licenses, and all sorts of fancy enterprise features to justify the price.
I used to see this in hotels when I travelled on business. When my clients were paying, they put me up in fairly luxurious hotels that charged me $3 for a room service coffee. When I was paying, I stayed in Motel6-type places that had free coffee in the room or at the end of the hall. I think everyone eventually offered free coffee in the room, but the last time i traveled there was a similar dynamic with WiFi: The naive would expect the cheapest accommodation to try to rent you internet access, but it was the other way around. "You have an expense account? Ha! Pay for WiFi!"
Same dynamic: If you are selling to business, you have to have the sales force, customer success organization, and features business want to buy (like back-end integration with business expense and planning systems). That all costs you money, which you recoup by charging an arm and a leg.
TL;DR: The moment you start selling to business, you are on a path to charging huge money for something that when sold to individuals, ought to be affordable.
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.
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.
Yeah, SMB has to be partner-led. They're often specialists (geography, vertical, etc.) That don't have the BigCo overhead that enabled BigCo to build the product in the first place. Partners are a huge part of selling for most B2B hardware and software companies. 50% or more of sales is not uncommon.
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.
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.
A novella? A short story? Both of these are common enough that I find this particular example rather strange.
ETA: And now I see it's in the context of non-fiction, ignore this. But I remember seeing novella-sized non-fiction books around about a decade ago, they were just not that common.
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/
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."
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 no widely known tooling to do so. A read-only format is not a thing that is possible. You can always just take some screenshots, or use a scanner, and reconstruct the font.
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.
Human decency is not a legal construct. Licensing terms say you pay this, you get that. If you sell a font for $20 then you se it for $20,regardless of who or what buys it.
Companies are under no obligation to pay more than what you are asking for. If you want more, then license it the way you want.
For a more gracious understanding of my comment, consider that I meant human decency might compel someone to honor the terms of the license, rather than abuse or ignore them. Relying solely on human decency would mean no auditing, no installed spyware, etc. That so few companies go this route suggests that despite having clear licenses, the humans involved aren't practicing decency enough to pay the bills.
In that context, yes, I agree, you can't rely on human decency, you (often) need mechanisms in place to restrict use.
Apologies for misunderstanding your post. I read it in the context of "companies should offed to pay more because they can afford it." Which is not what you said.
Of course this isn't a company thing. (companies are often very pro-active about licensing.) Humans on the other hand are very good at ignoring the rules - just read pretty much any thread on Netflix.
They do it because they can. There's not a lot of people creating high-quality fonts. If you've ever tried looking for free fonts, it quickly becomes clear that the quality is often lacking (inconsistency, missing glyphs, poor spacing/kerning). And then you find that it's not even free anyway, just 'free for non-commercial use'.
We'd see similar restrictions on licensing for other 'tools' (compilers, maybe?!), if there wasn't so much competition including open-source options.
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.
I think yours are good points and I'd be happy to figure out ways to work around those but honestly, those sound more sensible problems to solve than what we have now where we have sites like MyFonts that sell you fonts with pre-paid page views that expire after a certain date. Like, what the hell...
Market segmentation makes sense in principle. If Joes Bait & Tackle shop wants to use your font, it makes sense that Joe should pay less than Google. Unfortunately, for an intangible digital thing like a web font, coming up with a payment scheme leads to all kinds of absurdities.
That said, I think once you get to pre-paid expiring page views, that's a sign that we've entered the realm of insanity.
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.
Fun fact - versions that you can download from GF for self-hosting aren't necessarily what GF actually serves out.
Got burned by this with Noto Sans when the self-hosted version had different x-height at a certain text size and looked notably worse than the one of GF service.
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 by one and the infringement on her privacy caused her so much emotional damage that she wanted to be compensated for it. The women herself remained anonymous but last I heard the lawyer that worked with her on this got his tires slashed and threatend with violence.
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.
> there needs to be some distinction between actually legitimate "necessary for functioning" data processing which would include stuff such as Google Fonts
Downloaded fonts are not "necessary for functioning". Just use the system fonts.
Essentially no actual user cares AT ALL about the fonts on your Web site. If you're wasting time and energy on stuff like fonts, all you're doing is frustrating users by not putting that time and energy into anything actually valuable... while wasting every user's bandwidth.
Anyway, you have no control over what Google does with that IP address (or any associated cookies), and likely no reliable assurance that what Google does with the information is "necessary for functioning". I would expect Google to tie that download to every other download from that user's browser on every other site, and use the results for every possible purpose. If by some miracle Google doesn't do that, lots of the other third-party crap that sites embed will. Often the third party providers' descriptions of how their stuff work will be missing, incomplete, unintentionally wrong, intentionally misleading, or outright lies, so to have any real assurance you'd need to do some serious due diligence on every third party embed. Which nobody does, and which would defeat the "easy use" advantage of using those embeds to begin with.
Nearly all Web pages could load without a single connection to any server other than the one in the page URL. It's completely appropriate to treat every such connection as a disclosure of information to a third party... with all the regulatory requirements that should come with that... regardless of whether or not you've gotten used to making those connections without thinking about them. If it takes big fines to enforce that, well, I guess that's tough.
But it's the job of the government to enforce that via warnings and fines, not private entities sueing for "emotional damage".
The IP alone is almost useless anyway unless it can be tied to other information you've given up to google already - in which case you can't tell you are that cautious with your browsing to begin with.
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.
There's a tradeoff here I think. Designers should be passionate about their design, and push for the details that matter to them. But there's a line - too passionate and it becomes unworkable. But too far the other way, where they're not fighting for their design and too willing to compromise it, and you end up with lacklustre designs.
Oh, I certainly agree and sorry if that came off as "don't have passion". You should. I'm thinking of my experiences where the assessment was "this looks amazing but here's the technical reasons why this is a bad idea" was met with the moral equivalent of "how DARE you compromise my artistic vision for your filthy technology issues!", and that's usually a good time to part ways with that designer.
Pricing like this has always made me wonder if there's some behind the scenes deals going on, where the web and font designer work together to sell some deep pocketed corporation on a site redesign that uses an expensive font, then split the recurring revenue.
This likely would work in that case, as font licensing would be some small line item on the final bill.
In moving previous employer away from an expensive designer who charged thousands of dollars a month to host a <100k/pageviews a month site that had minimally modified wordpress, they couldn't ever come up with valid license for the fonts used, so I also wonder if the licenses are ever actually enforced.
I think it's often a mistake to insist on a third-party font if an environment-/OS-native font family does a good enough job already - it's just more data transferred, text often "jumping" around when the font data has finally been processed and is ready to render, and (often, in real-world use) data needlessly exfiltrated to some font-hosting CDN operator.
The only third-party font I'd consider using (for reasons of superior accessibility, not style) on websites and the like is the [Atkinson Hyperlegible Font](https://brailleinstitute.org/freefont), which is free to use and redistribute.
Self-hosted fonts load extremely fast for the user if you are conservative with what you include. The fallback system font should be as similar as possible, so that text doesn't jump around.
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 of Akzidenz-Grotesk, Berthold do seem to have a 'personal use only' licence which may be sufficient for a personal website.
A passable substitute for Akzidenz-Grotesk (and a very nice free typeface in its own right) is Liberation Sans, freely available under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.
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.
Indie type foundries are proliferating and I've seen so many amazing designs. I wish I could buy them all, but as a programmer I don't get a lot of chance to play with them.
This issue doesn't just affect bloggers and small time content creators, either. Lots of big companies are commissioning their own typefaces or switching their brand standards to use free fonts. It's such a shame – I would love to see more variety and expressiveness out there.
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 $500 license and serve it up to millions.
There are thousands of cheap or free options out there. This isn't a case where there's a limited supply.
But then giant corporations end up hiring font designers and they commission custom typefaces to get around the issue. So I don’t think this is a smart model. But the hell do I know.
Well, it depends. I bought font for personal projects that were a one time 20$ purchase which I don't mind especially if i'm supporting young designers. The reason why I have to deal with web fonts it's because graphic designers usually design websites using typefaces without even bothering checking the webfont license first and then is up to me to explain the extra costs to clients.
I was trained as a graphic designer. I have people in my circle who made fonts. I know how hard and time consuming it can be. And I wouldn't mind paying a fair price for them. It's the license the problem imo, not the price itself.
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?
And yet this sort of license is unlikely to disappear. This is as it's not targeted at individuals or small teams, it's for large orgs who won't bat an eye and chalk it up to the cost of building the service.
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.
Linked at the end of the article is something that I can't believe I haven't come across already (as a designer): https://www.fontshare.com
I initially assumed the author had linked it simply as a commercial type foundry with reasonable web licensing, but I did a double-take when I realized these were all free (beer rather than speech, thus distinct from the OFL community), in what appears to be a rather expansive freemium project from Indian Type Foundry.
While I'll have to spend some time using these to get a real sense of them (font quality often comes down to kerning pairs), my first impression is that these look absolutely top-tier, in the same league as both leading commercial type families and the best OFL projects.
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 jobs. It's a trade off.
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.
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 was in the market for something like that recently and had similar thoughts. It also introduces a lot of fear in the buying process (will I end up paying more for the fonts than I do for bandwidth if my project has moderate success?)
I think suggestions for reasonably priced fonts would be very welcome in this thread
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.
Typography is a highly specialized field that requires a lot of semantic knowledge about how letters interact to execute well. It's a much harder problem (for humans and computers) than people realize.
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.
> 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.
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.
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. Matthew Butterick's fonts cost more ($120 for a full typeface; mbtype.com) but have a very reasonable plain-English license.
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 - big websites can afford to pay more, and I wouldn't be surprised if a disproportionate amount of a typeface designer's income will come from a few heavy hitters; so without charging more for big websites, they'd have to raise the price for small ones, pricing hobbyists like me out of the market. Big font companies, though, often require you to install intrusive javascript tracking code to enforce these agreements, which is a step too far for me.
Fonts are pretty much a pure crystallization of the "information wants to be free"/"artists want to be paid" tradeoff. Digital fonts are nothing but information, so it seems absurd to charge more for using them on more websites/in more documents/with a larger team - there's no additional cost being incurred!; but without artificial restrictions on reuse, typeface designers wouldn't get paid at all.
tl;dr You're going to get better treatment and better prices from little one-person font designer shops than from the big companies (Monotype, Hoefler & Co). Unless you're a big co yourself, the OP is right; they're a waste of your time. But the little guys are a decent option, you just have to hunt around.
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.
This is 100% what prevents me from using paid fonts with views/month.
In a lot of cases, you cannot predict ahead of time what your page views are going to be. All it takes is a page to go viral on social media and you've blown through your allocation in a day. Even worse you have no idea on what the overage will be as most font licenses say "call us" if you need more than the X/month the package delivers.
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.
That I get but there's literally an entire world in between a family-run bakery and Nestlé. And prices are right now completely idiotic for most normal businesses.
And also, even though I understand the overall concept, why should Nestlé pay more? I'm asking as a general concept.
Should a freelancer charge more money for the same amount of work to a large client just because they're a large client?
One argument is: if font designers had to pick just one price, instead of charging a higher price to bigger customers and a lower price to smaller ones, they'd need to pick a higher price in order to recoup their costs. This would price some smaller customers out of the market entirely.
The comparison with a freelancer misses the weirdness of digital goods, where there's zero marginal cost. The work of designing a font is only done once, and then has to be recouped over many sales; since each sale involves basically zero additional work, any choice of how to split up the cost among customers is inevitably artificial, and not based on how much work it represents.
And of course, any artificial way to decide how much each customer pays is going to screw somebody over for no good reason. I don't think there is a perfect solution here.
On the one hand, the author is correct that rent-seeking on Akzindenz (a font that predates Helvetica for godsake) is some crazy bullshit. On the other, modern typographers are some of the lowest paid graphic artists out there. Doing a gazillion glyphs, balancing weights, kerning … it’s a ridiculous amount of work
"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 for a typeface)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...
Also from somebodynew: "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 it explicit that typefaces are not subject to copyright protection, while fonts can be copyrighted as computer software." [1] https://cdn.loc.gov/copyright/history/mls/ML-393.pdf