Not even that. If you want it for a web page you have to pay in blocks of page views. In my mind that moves it from "eh" to "LOL no". These are licensing terms for people who want the name.
Agency clients need their own subscription, legally: https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/font-licensing.html#web-...
And it's actually cheaper... for $4.99/month you get an InCopy subscription which includes Adobe Fonts. That's the same price as Typekit was before Adobe bought it.
I had one client that started getting their product catalog scraped aggressively, and the invoice for their licensed font usage that month was an order of magnitude higher than they expected (low six figures, vs. low five figures).
They slapped the site behind an aggressively configured enterprise WAF[1] in response to that bill specifically. It made for an abrasive visitor experience, fundamentally broke server logging data (due to header mangling), and constantly broke third party integrations.
It was such a pain to service the client that I ended up convincing their network security team to let me pilot Cloudflare in front of the WAF (that they insisted remain). Ended up using a Worker function to tidy up after the janky WAF header mangling, got them to remove the explicit challenge page, and just swapped out the licensed font for a generic/free one for suspicious activity.
All because of that stupid pageview based font licensing model and its susceptibility to abuse.
What did the WAF even do?
‣ You were not allowed to self-host the font files, and had to load them directly from the hosting URL provided by the font foundry
‣ There was no explicit reporting involved. Every time the font resource was downloaded from their server, the foundry counted that as a licensed pageview.
‣ The foundry used cache control headers[1] on the response, so that every page load required contacting their origin server and could be logged for billing purposes.
‣ The foundry sent an invoice, telling you what your usage was. If your resource download/pageview count was within your contractual limit, you're invoiced your base rate. If your pageview count was above your contractual rate, you pay your base rate + whatever your overage cost was.
The WAF did a bunch of stuff, but the primary headache was that they enabled challenge pages[2] for every single visitor as a knee-jerk reaction, with a ridiculously low validity timeframe. So every user got hit with an interstitial Javascript challenge page on first pageload, and if they stuck around for just a bit they'd get hit with another one out of nowhere. And that "other one" could easily be on a background resource load rather than the primary page itself, which would just hang. And the way the interstitial page loaded the final content for traffic that "passed the test" obliterated referral information and made it impossible to make heads or tails of your traffic data.
The intent being that automated traffic wouldn't get past the WAF and would never load the actual destination page, and by extension the precious font files. But the way it operated had a lot of nasty side effects that caused a never-ending stream of technical problems, in addition to just being a terrible user experience.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ca...
[2] https://www.imperva.com/blog/how-incapsula-client-classifica...
so, my corporate dirty tricks campaign company could offer to make your competitors advertising costs go through the roof if I find they've been using the wrong fonts?!?
> Ended up using a Worker function to tidy up after the janky WAF header mangling, got them to remove the explicit challenge page, and just swapped out the licensed font for a generic/free one for suspicious activity.
So if companies experience expensive font download attacks I can send them a reasonably priced offer for consulting services to fix this problem!?!
'but what about ethics'
grrrr, I hate that good angel.
So they can bitch all they want, but at the end of the day, code is king. So bend the knee.
lol what...
- External fonts are often purely cosmetic. Using what over time adds up to several megabytes of data for cosmetics is inconsiderate.
- inb4 "just disable remote fonts if you hate them": doing so breaks many websites that use icon fonts. Expecting users to have to manually configure 50+ websites (yes I did this, I count 54 websites on my exception list) is just insane.
- Many people need to use local fonts. Some dyslexic people actively choose a font that helps them read more easily. Asking someone to play the whack-a-mole game of "will disabling remote fonts break this site's icons or not" game on every site because of a disability just isn't right.
Just use sans, serif, and monospace for content. Let the user agent decide what that looks like, not your company's branding.
thank you for coming to my TED talk...
Small PNGs with good alt text are not as unsafe, large, and brittle as third party fonts.
You're not responding to what I said; you're responding to a caricature of what you imagine me to be like. Doing so derails the discussion.
Cosmetics can be used, but they need a strict performance budget. I'd say that 50kb of render-blocking/CLS-inducing cosmetics and 250kb total cosmetics would be quite generous for 90% of corporate websites, though I'd rather see much lower sizes and reserve more space for content. I would not count inline images that convey information as part of an article's content in this budget.
If you're worried about 3rd party fonts, then force the team to self-host the fonts. If the chosen fonts are not to the end user's liking, they can always override (if they are nerdy enough to know how). Just because lazy devs use 3rd party dosn't mean the baby has to be thrown out with the bath water.
2. Non-default fonts for text still create a suboptimal experience for users with reading impairments like dyslexia who could benefit from using their preferred fonts in place of sans/serif without breaking pages that need icon fonts.
> Just because you don't like it doesn't mean the rest of the world should suffer without it.
By the same token, just because your design/marketing departments think a design "pops" doesn't mean that disadvantaged users should have to suffer by your personal preferences. People who need privacy (e.g tor users who disable js/JIT/SVG/any non-whitelisted fonts), extra a11y (changing default colors, fonts, layouts), and extra bandwidth constraints (satellite internet with high packet loss) exist too, and excessive web design frequently gets these people shafted.
I'm not saying that the world needs to change for my personal preferences; I'm saying that the world needs to cater less to personal preferences and more towards people's needs. People who make up a disadvantaged minority of users need disproportionate levels of accommodation, and their needs are more important than graphic design.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/dfat/seldoc/1973/2203.htm...
I agree with your first statement, except that I'm stuck re-wording it to "I wish fonts weren't copyrightable" because I can't find an argument/proper analogy that works.
I don't know the details around copyright law, IANAL (surprise!) either, so I'm looking at this from an incredibly naive legal perspective -- that almost everything is copyrightable (in the United States) except for facts. Since copyright law predates digital fonts, you have to look at things they are most like to see what applies (and find a judge to agree, but that part seems to be the simple). Print fonts are not copyrightable. I'm not sure why they're not copyrightable -- were they explicitly excluded (i.e. there's a law on the books that says "Print fonts are not copyrightable"[0]) or were they found to be "like this other thing that is excluded, so they are excluded, too".
Then, looking at what's similar about print fonts versus digital ones, there's not really a whole lot other than that they're "concepts" that represent letters in this context. One is chiseled out of some form of metal or strong material, is that size/shape permanently and though there's science/research behind it, for whatever reason, it didn't represent enough of a kind of work to warrant protection. A font has a lot in common on the surface, but underneath it's a program[1]. One could extend that to say "bitmap fonts are so similar to print fonts that they should be excluded" but one cannot say the same for TTF/others and I'd imagine.
The bigger problem, though, is that exclusions to copyright are basically never made any longer. This used to be more common, but the entertainment industry's money/power continues to extend copyright in ways that benefit them to the exclusion of other industries -- particularly software -- the large players have a lot of money, so a law that was designed to equally protect invention/creation (really, patent law was by-and-large aimed at helping individual inventors protect their invention/give them a chance to capitalize it against abusive larger competition) ends up helping secure the existing players positions.
Now, I don't know if anyone wants Warner Brothers to make Mickey Mouse cartoons, but I suspect there's a less heavy-handed approach to protecting long-held IP while not extending copyright, basically, indefinitely for everything.
So yeah, all of that to say "No, I don't think fonts should be copyrightable, either ... but I can say that for so many things and there's so much wrong with Copyright these days that it warrants revisiting a reset/rethink." Maybe one day!
[0] It won't be that sentence, it'll be a page worth of explaining why it doesn't fall into the various defined kinds of works.
[1] TTF hinting is turing complete.
[0] https://typographica.org/on-typography/copyright-protection-...
Will the bits/bytes of a TTF be different if two people produced identically the exact same shape of the letters?
EDIT: let me clarify a bit. The GP said that the shape of the letters is not copyrighted in the US. Which implies to me that if Helvetica has the exact shape of the letter "s" to be like so, and if I were to manually trace the exact same shape (curves, width, height of the letter, etc) that I can do that and resell it (or open source it)
What I'm asking is, what prevents someone from skipping the step all together of tracing every letter in the Helvetica alphabet and instead, just digitally copies the TTF font file?
Would the TTF font file I create from a manual tracing of the Helvetica alphabet be different than if I simply digitally copied the official Helvetica TTF file?
[0] https://www.fonts.com/font/monotype/helvetica-now/licenses#
Font tracing is usually done by printing out the character to be traced at very large scale -- I've seen about 12" x 12" -- and placing it directly on a large digitizing tablet. A sequence of strokes / points is collected for the outline of the character, and then curves of somewhat reduced degree are fit to those strokes / points to both reduce font data size and reduce the impact of errors, inaccuracies, and quantization in the data capture.
Even at this huge scale, and with this amount of effort, the outline of your character will be very close to -- visually identical to! -- the starting character, but not exact. As a result, the generated font program will be quite different. For example, it may use a different number of control points for equivalent curves.
Now, one can imagine automating this process differently: Take a font file, digitally render each character, perturb it a small amount, and resynthesize the strokes to generate a new, different program for a visually identical font. This is generally against the terms of service for the initial font, however, which would make it a legal matter...
I doubt there's anything in the ToS for most fonts prohibiting me from rendering a short story that just so happens to contain every character and post it online for everyone to enjoy. I couldn't possibly predict that my friend who doesn't even know the name of the font, let alone ever agreed to any ToS, would take that render and trace all the characters on it.
Note that I generically said "render", not image or raster, since from my understanding, an SVG or vector PDF render of the font (not embedded, but turned into paths) wouldn't be any more copyrightable than a raster, but far easier to clone.
I'd assume the license for viewing the file is implied, but I have no clue if it would hold up in court if you viewed the file -> traced the output (which is copying the typeface, not the font.)
If you copy by hand (at what size? at what accuracy? do you include the same hinting and ligatures?) the file will not be bit-for-bit identical. The foundry cannot sue.
What stops you from copying any copyright-protected software? Technically, usually, very little (sometimes DRM). But, mostly, its social/economic constraints like your (or your business’) particular tolerance for legal exposure.
Personally, I don't like the idea of selling fonts with costs governed by web page impressions, either, no matter how common it may be in the industry. I genuinely like having what I consider to be nice typefaces for my web sites, but this kind of licensing makes it incredibly impractical for me to use most commercial options.
Type designs not being protected by copyright has benefits, too. Afaik, they're still protected by patent. (Not everything has to be copyright law! That's something the “intellectual property” lobby seems to be wilfully ignoring.)
People who argue against type design copyright fall into at least one of three camps: (a) they have no idea what it takes to make a good typeface, (b) their ability to distinguish typefaces doesn't go much farther than distinguishing sans/serif/monospace (if even that), and/or (c) they hope to be able to use other people's designs for their own benefit.
1. Retail sales of typefaces is a ridiculously unprofitable business, which is part of why every nearly independent foundry/type reseller of measurable size is ending up under the umbrella of Monotype Imaging. The handful of designers who have made a living from type design either are employed as staff designers for Adobe/Microsoft/Monotype, do high-value custom designs for publishing clients (although these are becoming increasingly scarce as publishers who still do print are less willing to spend money on quality²) or, the big one but probably gone for good now, embedded fonts in printers (Arthur Baker's deal with HP, he claimed, left him set for life financially).
2. A big part of Font Bureau's early capital came from producing a custom version of Palatino for the gravure pages of Playboy that would match the printed output on the offset pages. There's probably a whole book to be written about the ways in which Hugh Hefner spent Playboy money in ways that nominally benefited the magazine but had a bigger impact in providing cash to artistic endeavors (most notably writers) that wouldn't otherwise see much money.
3. And optional. If registration occurs after an infringement, the copyright holder can only sue for actual damages. Pre-infringement registration also entitles the copyright holder to sue for punitive damages.
> In the United States, fonts are protectable under copyright law. Typefaces, however, are not. ... A trademark protects what a typeface is called, a copyright protects how a font program is written, and a design patent protects letter design—how the letters appear.
So if I understand this correctly, then unless they have a design patent for the entire range of typefaces, you could use some of the typefaces if you use a different encoding. Perhaps someone with legal background can comment.