Copyright protects all creative works, with very few exceptions. Whether or not a font is a computer program has absolutely nothing to do with whether it is eligible for copyright protection.
Even if the font was just "a collection of little pictures" (that is, a bitmap font), it would still fall under copyright protection, unless the pictures were all in the public domain already, or some other special circumstances apply (e.g. creative threshold not met, created by the government, etc.).
The digital workaround is to have bytecode in font files that is copyrightable.
Does that mean that if you take a commercial font file and strip the bytecode, retaining only the glyph shapes, you can do as you wish with the result? And does that mean all bitmap fonts are actually public domain in the US?
(other than rasterizing text with it, at which point the output is not a “font” in the sense we usually mean when we use that term.)
Also, good luck even making a free font without being accused of making a “derivative work” of every copyright-encumbered font that’s come before. (“look at those serifs!”)
I know I started the thread by saying I think fonts deserve copyright, and I do, but not the typefaces themselves, as that would drastically disrupt what you can create. It would be especially arbitrary considering most faces are derivative of what came before, stretching back centuries. To paraphrase a famous quote, “You didn’t build that, [Adobe]”
So similar to those other things you can find a free or cheap generic off-the-shelf one that suits your use, open source fonts exist. Or you can pay for a specific one that suits it better.
Font design is a domain several times older than the oldest reasonable precursor to computers. It's imo shitty to stomp in and demand it conform to our idea of how licensing should work.
Yeah again I can download about a few hundred thousand open source tools like ffmpeg, git, Linux, Chromium, web servers, databases, queues, web libs, etc and almost always the best stuff is open source. Almost never is there some kind of per user fee just for copying code, and if it is, almost nobody is using it.
It's not shitty for me to call out greedy excessive licensing practices.
A font is much more similar to a completed web app than it is to the tools used to create that app. You don't expect someone to make an app for you for free, even if there are apps available for your use for free. Same thing here.
Typographers aren't getting rich lmao. They're trying to pay the rent with their skills same as everyone.
One-time purchase from fonts dot com. Yes, it was still scaled based on monthly impressions, but at least you could pay and use it forever.
The other thing I found was that, on the corporate scale, Adobe Fonts (aka Typekit) is a bargain. Basically an unlimited web and app license for everything.