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Comment by prmoustache | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who don't understand these desktop (per-user), webfonts (per-view), apps and ebook licensing models?

This is just too convoluted and complicated. What does desktop per-user even mean? Am I allowed to use the font and use it to produce a document if I pay for a 1-5 users license ? or do I have to pay more if that document ends up in the hand of more than 10 users? What if that document end up being a pdf that people might share all over the world? Have I right to use/reference it but not to embed it? What about views? If my blog get 4000 views on a regular basis but a post end up viral and views explode to hundreds of thousands? Am I suddenly in debt with the font creator?

For a start, a webfont is not different from a desktop font. It is a font and that's it.

Just put one single license at 1000usd for the individual one and 4000usd for the pack if you value your font that much for f... sakes.

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There's more and more good fonts being made available under the SIL licence - think MIT/BSD licence for fonts (https://openfontlicense.org/open-font-license-official-text/). The selection on google fonts should be good enough for anyone who doesn't want to go as far as hiring a design agency.

It's like the choice between some DRM-based "only works on our brand of device and only when connected to the internet" form of music, or legally acquired MP3s.

I would compare it with LGPL, actually. You can use the font in documents or software with no restrictions, but any modifications to the font itself must be released under SIL (and under a different name).

For the document use case, most document formats do not embed the font, so in that case, you are fine. The license includes an explicit call out for embedding into a pdf: "Embedding of the Font Software is permitted for Portable Document Files (PDF), but only in such a way that the recipient cannot edit or extract the Font Software from the document".

It is not especially clear what that means, but my assumption would be that if you use subset embedding feature when creating the PDF you are fine, as that means even if somebody tries to extract the font, they would typically get a not terribly useful result, as unused glyphs, substitution tables, etc. would have been stripped.

And yes, as a general rule you cannot usually embed or otherwise distribute font files except as permitted by the font license.

On the other hand, at least in the US, you generally can distribute rasterized output of a font, because past court cases have clearly established that typefaces are not subject to copyright, but rather only the computer programs that procedurally generate typefaces from parameters is subject to copyright (e.g. font files). So, it is the vector data and stuff like the hinting mini-programs in the font file which are subject to copyright, not the resulting images it generates. Of course, you must still follow the license for the font software while using it to create a rasterized output.

Font designers are a lot like musicians. They think the revenue of one hit song / font should be enough to retire on.

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