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Some interesting notes: professional font designers regularly copy each other's work. However, if you ask a legitimate font designer, they will trace another font. Where they get in hot water is if they copy and/or manipulate the actual Bezier points from another file (at which point they are copying the code). I remember going to a font design conference a long time ago, and some elite well known designers were aghast at another well known font designer for copying the bezier points directly off of another font and then manipulating the points from there. It's a crazy little dance they do to keep things legit.

I’d like to suggest that if a “crazy little dance” is required to “keep things legit”, it’s not.

If you use OCR to copy the entierty of a book and it became legit after doing so , I'd argue that the laws around that make little sense.

I was only suggesting a failure in law. Merely scanning is not creative and not protected.

As for fonts specifically, while I am not qualified to describe creative elements versus prior art, I think we can all agree the the field of commonly used fonts is quite well within the realm of the public domain. Font foundries only exist to squeeze unearned profits from only minor and non-expressive additions to that that is already well within accepted public art for many hundreds of years. They are swindlers and con artists.

I did not know this. It makes a whole lot of sense and is totally reasonable. Does this mean that a graphics designer who buys a font can just use it at will without royalties as long as they don't distribute the file?

Yes. That's why there are some knock-off fonts that is fully legal in the United States (apart from the name, but that's trademarks).

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.

Yes but it's complicated because everybody knows the value is in the shapes and it's gray area... many bigger agencies will ask for special licenses just to be sure. Especially if it's a logotype where font might be majority of value.

In particular, there are plenty of examples of companies putting out bounties to rogue employees who provide evidence that a business is using unlicensed software, so it's dangerous even if you can't prove through the output of the software alone that it is unlicensed.

> Once a typeset character sequence is printed or rasterized and flashed on the screen, any license that a foundry cooks up trying to control that use would be unenforceable.

That's not true. Distributing letterforms wouldn't be a copyright violation. But 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, which can impose whatever obligations they want, including usage restrictions.

Note that copyright licenses may not always be contracts, in cases where the recipient doesn't explicitly agree to them. Notably, the GPL is designed to work without needing agreement. From the GPLv2's text:

> You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works.

Though, the GPL has been enforced in the US as a contract anyway. [1]

But license agreements which you have to explicitly agree to are unquestionably contracts and enforceable as such.

Contracts are somewhat more difficult to enforce than copyright. You can usually only recover actual damages rather than statutory or punitive damages, and you can't use the DMCA as a shortcut to enforcement before going to court. But that's far from saying they're not enforceable at all.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2017/05/13/gnu_gpl_enforceable_c...

Saying flatly "that's not true" is too bold. I don't have a responsibility to answer for what you think I'm arguing, only what I'm actually arguing. (And equivocating on my words doesn't change that.)

> 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 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.

Sure, if you clone the font. But if you clone the font you can also distribute the clone as a web font. What's the difference?

> if you clone the font

Even without. Many use cases in print and other traditional, non-Web media exist where a clone wouldn't be required, because the end result is "flat", and you're not dealing in live text objects, unlike on the Web. You're shooting a fixed target. For example, it doesn't matter whether you reproduce a font's "fi" and "ff" ligatures if the blurb or logotype you're working on doesn't have those sequences. Worst case scenario, a person can get by with brute force—tracing the letterforms that they need. It's not as the operations to do that is any different from the kinds of edits they're already doing, anyway.

Fonts can also be protected by design patents, although I'm not sure how common that is.

So if I rasterise webfonts in a service I only have to pay once not per use? This sounds incorrect.

Webfonts are not licensed for server-side use at all, so you're not allowed to do this.

What if you do it on you desktop?

Server use is typically its own license category. At the company I worked for, their server licensing was based on number of server CPUs (technically only those actually used by the service using the font) and was valid for a year meaning you’d have to re-up annually.

I don't understand why your comment is downvoted because it's absolutely correct (for most type foundries anyway).

The law sees in color, not black and white. If your beige tower desktop computer is talking to users on the Internet, a court can decide you should have used server licensing.

This is the right principle to have absorbed from the article linked, but applied incorrectly.

For either of the hypotheticals here, it would be possible to operate in the way described, subject to some constraints. There is no reason to think that the courts would perceive any legal imperative to recognize the distinction between server licenses or otherwise on copyright grounds. Companies can't invent law and say that it applies just because they wrote down how they'd like for things to work.

The technical reasons referenced earlier are what make these hypotheticals untenable, not law.

I read the question as "what if the designer uses designer tools to make a PNG with text instead of HTML that calls for a fancy font, then posts that?" It seems like that should (in the US) work like any normal use of a font on a designer's pc^Wmac, and the image doesn't get copyright-like encumbrances from the font.

Exactly. I should have been more clear.