Font licensing is ill, please help heal it

Note: US law (for rather obvious reasons). Europe (depending on the country) has either a design trademark or a design copyright available, which means that foundries can (in theory) control their use there (in practice, uniform worldwide licensing means they go for the lowest common denominator). Asian (mainly East Asian) IP laws does have a nuance, which means that whether a design is copyrightable depends if the purpose of the said design is utilitarian or artistic.

> if the font distributor shows the buyer some text and requires them to click "I Agree" before downloading the font, then they have a valid contract

Right. But if they don't agree, then no legal mechanism exists to keep the "customer" from getting those shapes from someone who doesn't impose a contract, since anyone can peddle the same letterforms without violating copyright.

> But are fonts scarce? Are they scarcer than the attention required to use them? When do we say, "good job, that's enough fonts" and move on?

You disagree about the idea of removing IP protections from fonts, but beyond that you seem to agree that Libre font collections may basically be Good Enough(tm) and that there might not be much of a need or justification to waste time thinking about the proprietary/commercial market at all.

I do generally disagree with both ideas, I think people are a little too quick to dismiss the creative and functional value of new fonts, and I think that typography as a skill is generally undervalued in technical circles. But that disagreement aside, I didn't read GP's post as an argument that there's a pressing need to liberate fonts, just that to them it's not clear what copyright is even protecting here in the first place, given how little (again, to them) functional value that proprietary fonts provide.

'cause yeah, I kinda am.

The cost of compliance while not using proprietary fonts is the same as the cost of compliance while using them. The "just don't use them"-strategy fails to free up the efficiency that they're bogging down. Sure, it's not a big deal, you can look into the project and find the font and hope you put something helpful in the commit where you included it and send an email to legal--or whatever the hoops are for your particular case. But it's one of a million tiny third party concerns that are getting between you and your ability to give your user a good experience.

I understand why it exists: intellectual property creation is a full-time occupation and the creators need to eat. But that just makes it an awful but necessary stopgap until we figure out a better way to feed everyone.

I suspect we'd also see bespoke development of fonts as a branding initiative, even in a post-IP world. Think how Gill Sans is instantly recognized as "the London Underground font" even for people who've never been there. You know every major brand in the world would like to elevate themselves to that degree of cultural permanence.

It seems similar to the retroactive public goods DAO that the Ethereum people are working on

We set aside the money, and then do some analysis of how popular fonts are (based on web traffic and which fonts are in use), and then divide up the pool of money to reward people based on how popular the font is?

This has the dual purpose of keeping a market based allocation but also prevents having to rely on artificial scarcity.

I'm OK with paying for a level of use as long as it's generous and I'm not limited completely arbitrarily.

You'd be surprised by the number of foundries that explicitly forbid sub setting of the fonts (because that makes you an evil hacker I guess?), so you're not allowed to only use Latin on your website, gotta load the whole fucking thing. The font has weird kerning and you want to fix it? Yeah, not sorry not allowed either.

The restrictions in font licenses are completely ridiculous.

UBI may not solve this entirely but if it can free people of the need to worry about their economics whilst simultaneously allowing people to do whatever they want, for a lot of folks that is enough.

Additionally, I don't really see the issue with selling (NOT licensing) something up-front, if there is a culture of setting pricing to be reasonable and fair instead of the current leave-no-money-on-the-table approach.

Those that want to earn above and beyond can still find employment in critical services...banking, healthcare, government, whatever, while those that want to opt out of employment are free to do so on their terms.

Fewer commercial incentives may improve what bubbles up as the incentive process is sometimes interfering badly with the discovery, or production, of the best stuff.

I drifted a way from worrying about typefaces but for awhile was really focused on them for publication reasons.

Things have changed a lot in the last 10 years or so because of Google Fonts and other similar things but my impression has always been:

1. For whatever reason, there seems to be this black-and-white schema that font licenses either need to be ridiculously expensive and locked down, or completely free. I've never really understood why you couldn't go buy a personal use of a font (with generous use allowances) for say, 10 USD. The idea that people might actually be willing to pay if it were affordable seems lost, probably because it's usually large firms commissioning the typefaces to begin with. But if you make it for an initial project, reap the benefits, and can relicense it, why not do so understanding that you might make some money from large numbers of small purchases? (For what it's worth, I think similar issues arise in other areas where there's overly restrictive IP -- you get this black-and-white seesaw between draconian IP and totally libre offerings as a blacklash, with nothing in between).

2. What seems to evolved in some cases is some initial commission by a large firm, followed by libre licensing afterward, which makes some sense to me. Then the designer gets paid a large fee, people get to ooh and aah at the beautiful font, and the company gets extra advertising for commissioning a nice libre font. It's basically a form of advertising -- people download the font and see that company A paid for it, and then they get some branding association. The desire for fresh branding and individuating, along with goodwill, is part of what drives the commissions. Or put some relatively brief term on the commercial font, after which it becomes open.

Musicians don't starve, they put on concerts and experiences and sell merchandise. In many ways music has already given up ownership of the music itself, because they let Spotify/Apple Music/et al eat their lunch. Fractions of a penny per-play is like nothing for 99% of musicians.

People will pay $$$$$ to hear the original Beatles give a live performance. They will pay $ to hear a cover band play the same music, even if the cover band is better.

Reframe the issue as recorded music being advertising for the live concert performance, where the money will be made. Many bands have already figured that out that's where the real money is these days.

Earnings from copyrighted musical works probably follows a pareto distribution--something like 90% of earnings are accrued by <10% of copyright holders. So the copyright regime rewards, in order, 1. music distributors, 2. big name artists, and finally 3. most other artists who receive only token earnings.

Music was an idyllic vocation before records and long before copyright. There are many ways to support the arts other than copyright. Grants for public theatres, music education, and street venues would be more egalitarian and benefit more musicians than a copyright regime.

But I don't think this works as an economic system for rewarding creators, given corporations really do not have an incentive to help others benefit from new font creation or other artistic expression, just because they have themselves.

It would be interesting to have a list of all kinds of products where licensing can be the biggest headache in using them. Then seeing if a common theme emerges that might suggest a fairer, more mentally efficient, licensing mechanism.

I wouldn't describe it as public "seizure", more the omission of that previously-mentioned framework which in-turn allows the work itself to be free of encumbrance.

Does a U.S. government worker creating something public domain experience a "seizure" of his work? I don't think so. And in fact the government functions quite well with this rule in-place. Why can't we consider extending that to the private sector as well?

There is the old adage of, "information wants to be free". In a way, so does everything else.

But particularly in the digital domain -- which economically can be described as a land of plenty, where information can be freely copied, transformed, and executed with little-to-no-cost -- we should embrace this new economy rather than trying to force physical-world constraints where they don't belong.

I used to work at eharmony. One of the biggest complaints we had from users was that paid users were still shown ads. The users hated it, but the analytics showed that we made more money with the ads than without the ads so to hell with the users' experience on the site, we had better results with the ads.

The first amendment has nothing to do with it. A big part of it is that type design was largely a European activity until the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century. American typefounders lived off copied designs (and even as America gave birth to Linn Boyd Benton, Bruce Rogers and Frederic Goudy, there was still a lot of stealing happening at the big American foundries (the innovation happening in the US tended to be more technical than artistic. American Monotype has approximately zero noteworthy typefaces created under its auspices, while its English counterpart had a long streak of notable designs released in the first half of the twentieth century which are responsible for the look of modern book typography).

This history of stealing designs for competitive reasons was a bit part of why there was resistance on the part of the big players in the industry to seriously pushing for typeface design protection. While Bitstream had Matthew Carter designing excellent faces for them (and overseeing licensed designs from ITC), the vast majority of their type designs (all the ones named style + number), were slavish clones of other companies' designs. The big companies make the bulk of their typeface income not from retail sales but from licensing deals (e.g., Apple and Microsoft made licensing deals with Adobe and Monotype respectively for most of their system fonts, although some smaller design houses like Hoefler & Co., Bigelow & Holmes and Tiro Typeworks (off the type of my head) have managed to get some of that licensing. The late Arthur Baker made the biggest part of his lifetime income from a licensing deal with HP.