I think the author is probably mistaken in their understanding of something here.
Foundries don't license fonts for "desktop use" on seemingly generous terms out of the goodness of their hearts. It's because they have no choice. Letterforms are not copyrightable. The font file†, however, is. 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. The only leverage they have is controlling the distribution of the file. As it turns out, due to the way Web fonts work, this means they do have leverage on the Web—for technical reasons.
If the foundries had a choice, they wouldn't opt to license Web fonts more generously, they'd opt to extract more money out of the traditional uses.
(Note that this is written from the perspective of the way that copyright works in the US.)
† EDIT: I realized just now while brushing my teeth that this might lead to further mistaken understanding when put this way. So pretend instead that I said something like "what's in the font file", and pay particular attention to <https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23>.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you're in the business of font making, then I'm sorry about this, but... Which of these would be better for the vast majority?
- We remove IP concerns from fonts entirely. All existing fonts are free to use however you want, but there are no incentives to commercially produce more fonts.
- We find a better way for people to continue to have to think about whether they're allowed to use a given font instead of focusing more fully on what they want to communicate.
It's the role of economics to address problems caused by scarcity. 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?
Or do we really need to reserve a fraction of the global mindshare for font design in perpituity? I'm happy to be convinced of this, it's just that I don't see it from here.
I think it's revealing that message board people are so quick to extend arguments against intellectual property to typefaces. It's hard to think of something that people "need" less than a proprietary font; there are thousands of free ones, and there is no utility benefit to any of the non-free ones. It's hard to see a motivation for "liberating" them beyond spite.
What does it reveal? That we're spiteful about having to submit to an "are you allowed to use this?" interrogation process every time we publish something, whether or not we used something proprietary in it?
'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’m sorry but I don’t follow you. Isn’t it stupid easy to get plenty of high quality fonts licensed for free at somewhere like Google fonts. If you need something else specific shouldn’t the creators be entitled to license their work? Why should you be entitled to their works?
What I'm saying is that if I'm working on a project that includes a font somewhere and somebody points at some text and says "what is that font and are you allowed to use it?" I have to dig through the code and find the font and research its licensing whether or not it's proprietary.
So long as the expectation is that we all must be able to prove that we're allowed to use the fonts that we're using, a proprietary font anywhere is a drag on productivity everywhere.
Again I'm sorry but how often does that happen and how long does it take to verify your licenses? It just seems like a small price to pay for using someone else's work.
>It just seems like a small price to pay for using someone else's work.
Their example would still hold true if they were using a font they developed themselves, except instead of having to record the license information they would have to produce a license.
I don't know how common it is, but in my case it was built into a binary, and it took us all day to take apart the build and figure out that yes-we were fine.
I think you and GP are in some ways saying the same thing.
> 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.
When I look at pictures of very old documents I can see that 1800's font preferences are different than 2000's font preferences. Now that fonts are digital and can be shared in an instant, instead of pieces of metal, do you think the preference drift will persist?
I wasn't so much trying to downplay the value of typography outright, but rather downplay the marginal value of 2022 typography over 2021 typography.
Perhaps they are an easy target because they are "unnecessary". They add some, very minor value, but tend to ask for very high prices and inflexible terms (think of web-fonts with per-pageview restrictions), so there are few friends for the font designer community.
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.
I think intellectual property is awful in every form. With real property, if someone takes it then you haven't got it anymore, so it makes sense to protect it. But you can't take intellectual property away from its owner.
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.
Imagine if we had a National Endowment for the Fonts. A chunk of cash set aside, and every year a panel reviews all the fonts that've been created that year, and divides up that cash accordingly.
And then, save for the ability to claim credit for creating a font within one year of the font's creation, we remove all intellectual property protections from all fonts forever.
The size of the industry creating fonts would scale to whatever the size of the kitty can sustain. Some hobbyists would find themselves surprisingly rewarded for their work. Nobody would have to track or license anything.
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 pretty sure that's how races-to-the-bottom get incentivized, but yeah, I'm sure popularity would be one metric considered by the panel. It does mean something, I just don't think it's the only figure of merit.
Personally, I've decided not to buy a font anymore if it doesn't have a "Universal" license that encompasses all uses at once.
I want to be able to use the font however I see fit and not feel FOMO'd in buying a Desktop+Web license because what if I ever want to use it on the web might as well get the discount now. Wait now I can't use it in an app ! Damn.
True, but that's the best compromise to me next to open-source / ofl fonts (because let's not forget that fonts are software).
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.
On my website, I can't measure exactly how many page views there are because there are no tracking scripts or other ways to discern between bots and humans. That means any font that has a page view limitation is a complete non-starter for me. Therefore, it seems like OFL is the only "reasonable" option other than an unlimited font license.
What happens if my website gets really popular and nobody's there checking the analytics? Then that's a problem unless it's perpetually babysat all because of a font.
Honestly the whole idea of creators controlling their IP is fucked. Everywhere, everyone wants to get in on carving out a million monetizable use cases while the rest of us collapse under the weight of an entirely bullshit system of rights enforcement.
We should not have to walk on eggshells!
Here's an alternative: anything you put out there, isn't yours any more. It belongs to the public. Art, software, music, fonts... it is in the hands of the people. Your role as creator is limited to stewardship.
Giving creators a monopoly over their creation for a limited time is a good thing.
However, life of the author plus 70 years, and whatever that means if a company owns it instead of a flesh-and-blood individual, is way too long. I can't even come up with a reason to defend that isn't "I'd like to create a multi-generational legacy and copyright minefield based on my IP so I can collect royalties without having to actually do anything productive."
In modern times it should maybe be 5-7 years, ability to collect significant damages shouldn't start until works are formally registered, and if you don't use your works in a commercial revenue-generating activity, the protection expires after 1 or 2 years. Longer or shorter durations for certain industries may make sense.
Only a piece of the solution, you still need the economic incentive, and that incentive shouldn't be just hoping you're popular enough for people to donate to your stewardship.
Let me know what you come up with, there are likely some crafty solutions.
Universal Basic Income could help a lot here. The rise of open-source and volunteer movements shows that a lot of people want to work on what they are passionate about, if only for their jobs and the need to earn money.
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.
The need to earn money incentivizes people to work on things that are useful to others. If people only followed their passion, and the results of that are of no interest to others, why should others pay them to do that?
> The need to earn money incentivizes people to work on things that are useful to others.
No, it does not. The need to earn money incentivizes people to work on things that allow them to extract money from others. This sometimes happens to line up with "useful", and there's probably even a positive correlation overall, but they're not remotely the same thing.
> The need to earn money incentivizes people to work on things that allow them to extract money from others.
You're talking about things like acquiring money through force or fraud. This is not how free markets work. Free markets work by creating products that people want to buy and freely trade their money for.
If I create a widget and you want it more than the money it costs, I am not "extracting" the money from you.
The need to earn money also incentivizes people to work on products that are monetiziable. More specifically, it encourages people to move their project in a monetiziable direction which puts the priority on revenue generation over quality.
Does it though? It seems instead the incentive might be to create broad and accessible works that will appeal to the widest audience. Marvel movies are produced and performed with a high level of quality; yet the stories are simple, unchallenging, and easily accessible.
It's also possible to create content that's more experimental and creative, by focusing on more niche audiences. This is evidenced by the current golden age of TV and streaming, with a wide variety of dramas, comedies, documentaries, etc.
> The need to earn money also incentivizes people to work on products that are monetiziable
So, a product for which people are willing to give you money in exchange. People are not likely going to buy a shitty product unless the situation involves monopoly (natural or otherwise) or regulatory capture
That's true physical products. I had software in mind when I made my comment. The need to earn money means testing paywalls and creating subscription features (and then adding nag screens to encourage customers to subscribe).
> which puts the priority on revenue generation over quality.
On the other hand, the need to be able to sell things means the quality has to meet the customer's expectations.
For example, cars produced by free market companies far exceed in quality those produced by socialist operations.
In fact, I suspect you'd be hard pressed to find any examples of anything people made purely for their own amusement being better quality than items they made for sale.
For example, the software I write for my own personal use tends to be pretty slipshod, as it only has to work for my use case. I don't bother with coherent error messages, documentation, a decent user interface, or fixing any bugs that don't directly impede what I use it for. Doing that stuff is simply not worth my time unless I'm planning on distributing it.
I like the way CirclesUBI handles it. If you appreciate a craftsman's work you can "trust" them. Trust is a pact to value their UBI tokens as much as you value your own.
So you don't have be in the market for a font to support fontmakers (or anything else).
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.
What do we need an incentive for? The world isn't exactly short of art and lot of people will keep doing it for fame and glory or for its own sake.
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've been working full time on Open Source software for 20 years. I don't get paid for it, though I do derive income from lectures, training, and other paid gigs as a result. I've also turned down many high paying job offers as another consequence.
I agree with all of this, but there's also a flip side.
If you benefit from somebody's work, you should find ways to support it. Not because it belongs to anybody, but because whatever it is, you should have an incentive to keep it going.
I support the good will in voluntary support for the arts.
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.
Look at all these terrible attempts at controlling, and just how well they work. In every sector you have a cadre of elites and a much larger cohort of have-nots.
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.
Most musicians are not making their money from copyright but from performances. Only a tiny % of musicians ever get a record deal. Of those with record deals, the vast majority of the earnings goes to the record label and not the artist.
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.
> So musicians shouldn’t get value when people play their music?
People will pay $$$$$ to hear the original Beatles give a live performance. They will pay $ to hear a cover band play the same music, even if the cover band is better.
Reframe the issue as recorded music being advertising for the live concert performance, where the money will be made. Many bands have already figured that out that's where the real money is these days.
> People will pay $$$$$ 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.
The novelty of having musicians rise from the dead for a concert does help there.
If Paul and Ringo hired a couple others to fill out the quartet, I bet the tickets would sell fast at a very high price.
P.S. That Greta Van Fleet singer didn't want to be compared to Robert Plant. What an idiot. There's a guy who sounds like Plant in his youth - what an incredible opportunity he is just throwing away. He could enlist the help of Plant & Page and create a new Zep songbook. Everybody wins - especially me, because there's only so many times you can play Dazed and Confused.
Note that Adam Lambert who joined Queen to fill in for sadly absent Freddie Mercury has done very well indeed.
I believe OP wants musicians to be compensated for the music they create because they believe that this will improve the quality of the music that is created.
I am sure that if there are no incentives to creating new music some people will still do it. Just like I am sure that if there are no incentives to creating new books some people will still write. Or movies will still be created even without funding.
That being said, I enjoy having access to blockbuster movies, AAA video games, books by professional authors, and songs by professional song writers.
I prefer to live in a world in which those things can exist. For those things to exist, they need business models that can support them. I would choose a world with high quality professional content over a world in which everything is free.
I didn't say musicians (and I did mean creatives in general) shouldn't get paid.
However, I'm not sure an entitlement should exist whereby the act of me acquiring or listening to a recording of a performance--for/on my own devices, in my own home, etc.--results in an obligation for me to pay the artists.
If your business model ultimately depends on controlling what people do in their homes or personal space, or personal devices, then it's bad.
Would you buy a book if you had to pay each time you read it?
That would mean that there's no value in creating the music. Only in reproducing it. People would have even less incentive to create new stuff instead of redoing old stuff. That is definitely not what I, as a listener, want.
Except that people create music all the time despite their knowledge that they won't get paid for it.
There will also always be a paying market for composing, say, the soundtrack to a movie where it has to reflect the narrative and events in the film. For example, the Bugs Bunny cartoon music was performed while projecting the cartoon on a screen, so the musicians could match the timing. The music was very much customized to the cartoon.
Most musicians don't make music for its monetary value, but because of personal fulfillment. All but the most successful 1% of musicians would find greater monetary value doing something else for the amount of work it takes to get to that level.
> People would have even less incentive to create new stuff instead of redoing old stuff.
In fact, I speculate the opposite might be true. How many big pop artists go into semi-retirement by their mid-30s once they've dropped off the charts? Why keep making music when you can comfortably collect off all your past hits? Certainly there's no economic incentive to keep working once you can collect sizeable rents.
Sharing freely and embracing open source has been an unalloyed good for encouraging the development of software; so there is some insight to your comment. But participation in open source is voluntary. And right now any artist or musician can make the voluntary and free decision release their work under a Creative Commons license. It would be a degradation of individual liberty to require all workers in all creative fields to open source their work. That's not a choice you, or me, or the government should get to make on behalf of another person.
One might argue that some regime of publicly funded remuneration could be just compensation for the public seizure of all creative output. But that's orthogonal to the point. The seizure itself is the problem.
My issue is more that an individual work can't stand alone, in a legal sense. There is always the work, and then there is a an artificially-imposed, invisible framework around it that prohibits the free use of the work it supposedly protects.
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.
Just a data point. My team manages about 15 different brands with a couple hundred million annual page views and we pay north of $100K a year for fonts and believe that to be a good value for the money. The difference between a good Monotype font and a free or cheap font is worlds different when your concerned with a brand looking as good as can be. The cheaper fonts sometimes have odd space in them that make letter spacing or line-height changes look horrible.
We haven't. Although we do plenty of testing in general. We don't view it as a ROI driver, just an element of a strong brand. Which is much more subjective.
Surely just aesthetic pleasure is worth something? Shall we all live, work and play in brutalist utilitarian buildings unless it can be demonstrated that there are better results from something else?
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.
One thing that baffles me in the last webfonts i’ve used is that in the install instructions the css has some @import tracking line and an explanation that the font does not work without that line, which is a plain lie. If i already have some troubles understanding charging by page views, trying to force my users to be tracked by them is just crazy.
I think you overestimate how technical most of these type foundries are. The industry is basically few huge corporations like Monotype, Adobe, Google Fonts and then 100s of tiny independent 1-5 person companies. These are no web engineers and mostly are just somehow trying to figure out how to survive. I wouldn't think there's much malice behind it... more like incompetence. Most of webfonts sales are delivered just as .woff files to be selfhosted.
Probably also reason why people use them because Google Fonts exists specifically to track people.
And that's why I either use the awesome opensource fonts (they've really very good lately), or use Adobe Fonts (formerly TypeKit).
As much as I hate Adobe, the rented fixed monthly payment is the only logical alternative to current font pricing models for web. Rent Photoshop for $10 a month and you get Adobe Fonts for web with unlimited usage, as a bonus.
Logical alternative for you. 10usd month through corporation is exactly the way Spotify is robbing musicians. Lets not forget these people dont have live performances or merch to fall back to.
"people visit websites for information they’re interested in, not design and not the font in which text is rendered in"
If that's the case, then what's the problem? You can use plenty of attractive fonts already installed on client devices, or something like Google Fonts for free. If the design isn't important, then that's more than enough.
I've seen licenses where you pay per CPU on the server(s). What does that even mean if you serve the font using something like S3? And if you use a CDN, do you have to pay for the CPUs at the edge too?
Unreasonable licensing for web fonts results in companies not buying those fonts.
Helvetica Now Variable Complete Family
Unlimited for only $2,705,353,197,552,556,500.00
That is two quintillion seven hundred five quadrillion three hundred fifty-three trillion one hundred ninety-seven billion five hundred fifty-two million five hundred fifty-six thousand five hundred dollars!!
I agree with this. It's too complicated and frustrating to use a licensed font on the web. The argument is that people who make fonts deserve to be compensated for their work, and I agree. There has to be a better way though. I avoid using fonts that I love because the licensing just gets in the way.
Crowdfunding has been extremely successful at fostering the creation of freely-licensed content while handsomely rewarding the creators for that same content. (It's easy to miss this because it's only a fraction of what's crowdfunded as a whole, but free content still wins wrt. its broader impact.) There's no reason why this model could not be applicable to the design of new, high-quality fonts. Font makers only have to name their price, commit to an open license on the product and roll the dice.
Yep I remember backing FontAwesome's initial Kickstarter and, as they grew and evolved, emailing for licensing for basic on-prem / OEM / content editor use, and it was clear the modern web folks like them didn't have a way to sustain anything beyond their saas flow.
As with the rest of OSS, big companies are starting to release their own equivalents as they need these kinds of use cases. So it's near-term right of FA for sustainable or more profitable growth to do their model, but long-term a big existential risk. Was frustrating as someone explicitly and demonstrably ready to pay and valuing ISVs thriving here and being forced to go the bigco oss way.
One thing that grinds my gears is that ebook font licensing is somehow separate from pdf font licensing and on a per title basis, despite them being /the same thing/.
Similarly, application embed licensing and webfont licensing are separate, which kinda makes sense, until you make a webapp. (In reality though, I believe the spirit of the distinction is whether the user of the app can enter any text and have it appear in that font, but they don't say that.)
The market evolved into this state. Traditionally fonts were licensed as as software licenses per machine. It was not great but it was a standard. With web there was more opportunity to change price based on impressions. But for big projects - logos, tv ads etc. you almost always need a special license.
The problem is to make fonts cheap for solo designer doing local prints where 60usd is a lot vs designer in agency doing multi national ad where 3000usd is drop in budget.
There are competing models in the market. As print slowly disappears most foundries are pricing on amount of web visits, app downloads and social media followers. Some progressive ones are even moving to pricing based on size of company / number of employees like Dinamo https://abcdinamo.com/news/about-our-pricing. There is also Fontstand https://fontstand.com/ thats "reting" of fonts but that's again mostly for small desktop publishers.
See the comment re: copyright issues. Here in the U.S. the First Amendment severely limits what one can and can't do regarding font licensing. Restricting what one can and can't do with a (rasterized, at least) font has historically been interpreted as limiting speech. As a result, it's generally not possible to do the typical software licensing thing and say 'you can do this and this but not that' as the First Amendment will steamroll much of what one tries to put in the license.
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.
You are correct that in the 19th and early 20th century, we used to 'pirate' just about everything. Thomas Edison made a fair amount of money doing this with movies, for example.
However, you are incorrect about this particular item. Sure, one can produce a font file that is licensed and distributed with a computer/web browser/whatever and it's pretty easy for a determined large group of users to not pay for more than a single copy of said font. At the very least, a user can take said font rasterize / embed it in a thrilling rendition of 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' along with every other letter/symbol the typeface provides entirely legally that all are free to use. More commonly, someone else can re-implement the font that is an (almost?) perfect copy of the original. That's how the computing world got all of those TrueType fonts that were knock-offs of Adobe's Type I fonts and a big part of why Postscript is not really a thing for most users anymore.
"Copyright law does not protect typeface or mere variations of typographical ornamentation or let-
tering. A typeface is a set of letters, numbers, or other characters with repeating design elements that
is intended to be used in composing text or other combinations of characters, including calligraphy.
Generally, typeface, fonts, and lettering are building blocks of expression that are used to create
works of authorship. The Office cannot register a claim to copyright in typeface or mere variations
of typographic ornamentation or lettering, regardless of whether the typeface is commonly used
or unique. There are some very limited cases where the Office may register some types of typeface,
typefont, lettering, or calligraphy. For more information, see chapter 900 , section 906.4 of the
Compendium. To register copyrightable content, you should describe the surface decoration or other
ornamentation and should explain how it is separable from the typeface characters."
Notice the 'building blocks of expression'... that's the whole First Amendment bit. IIRC, there was a Supreme Court case about this.
I love typography but decided to follow the trend of removing custom fonts from my websites as the value add is actually very, very low. A lot can be achieved with some simple letter spacing and line height, as well as antialiasing correctly. I looked into paying for nice custom typefaces but the cost is too much.
I have been using the same open source typeface for programming since I found it many, many years ago. The industry reminds me of music licensing, there are so many free choices that are public domain, but if you have the money you flex and spend it on something custom, even if it is more or less the same as the free option, because that distinction is made by the end users. It reminds me of 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia' using public domain music for many of the scenes and the theme, and now I hear that tune in many TV shows.
Please don’t fix fonts with letter spacing and other hacks. Fonts are engineered with specific fitting (even before kerning pairs are added) and this would just make things worse.
You can however continue to use open source fonts! There is nothing wrong with that. There are many amazing free fonts out there that compete with commercial alternatives.
But to say that Fonts don’t add any value is preposterous.
I didn't mention fixing anywhere. Having spent a portion of my career as a graphic designer, letter spacing / kerning was used in literally every print piece I ever made, so to suggest they are to be used as provided is preposterous.
In 2014, when I was working on post-production for a TV ad, the producer wanted to use a typeface, Typotheque's Tribute Tribunal Std Bold, until he found out that the "broadcast and film" license fee for a single year of on-air use in North America was $17,465.
All the webfonts I’ve ever seen have a variation of this clause, which I think unintentionally makes them unusable on the web for their stated purposes. Do they think that @font-face prevents downloads? Anybody can just right click in the network tab iirc
> The Licensee may use the Licensed Webfont(s) only on the web, for styling Websites, using the @font-face selector in CSS files, subject to the following restrictions:
> 1. The Licensee may not link to, nor put online, any version of the font downloadable and installable by any third party
new to the fonts space, but I really wanted a totally unique look for a new site I'm building and came upon an font foundry called photo-lettering. The story of how itsfonts came to exist and be available on the web is truly cool (and informs this debate a little).
Photo-lettering, Inc aka PLINC was a high-end foundry and design firm in New York City beginning in the 1930s that was used as a volume service provider by Madison Avenue (think proofs flying across midtown via courier). Their unique claim to fame was that each individual letter of their font faces existed as a large photographic plate which was then projected onto layouts using a proprietary overhead system. The result satisfied the exacting needs of magazine designers and such in this era.
Fast-forward to the present, and the fonts, which are supercool in a 60s 70s way (think warholesque), have been scanned and lovingly converted to webfonts, using various advanced features available in opentype etc.
They do use that funny desktop/webfont pricing described by the OP. I'm more than willing to plunk down $125 apiece for the 2 fonts I'm using because of the obvious value this company is offering. The pricing does get into nosebleed territory relatively quickly, but this is a product I feel really good about supporting.
I just purchased $12,000 worth of fonts and it nearly broke me (mentally) in terms of how to do it the right way across web, desktop and app. The system truly is broken in every regard.
If I'm honest with myself, when I get mad at font licensing it is because there is a great mismatch between my budget and the font publisher's price list.
Calling out for the common folk or small business to pay for the fonts they used is doomed to fail. (Not saying the article does that, just pointing it out.) Calling out to fight insane legal practices is even less likely to ever succeed as well.
IMO a good solution to both licensing plus compensating the hard-working people who make fonts would be:
1. Integrate those fonts in the mainstream browsers;
2. Have the browser vendors pay a flat fee to the font creators, annually. I think something like $20_000 per font per year is quite fair and definitely won't even register in the balance sheets of Google, Apple and Mozilla.
There's no way this whole thing can be solved by making small customers pay. Even if some do most will not so such a business strategy simply doesn't scale. Even if I make $10_000 a month from a small business of mine I'd still not consider paying something like $500 for a font unless I am sure I am going to use it for 4-5 years. In my eyes it's an insanely high cost for just one tiny part of my online business.
But one thing I don't know and would love to learn more about is this: are the professional fonts usually paid per month or only once for a lifetime? If the latter then I guess many smaller business could still bear the cost.
There are too many typefaces. I don’t want to rely on the browser to integrate a work of art that I created.
The way it is, the current situation, allows the typographer to sell directly to consumers and select appropriate license. Whether that’s expensive or too restrictive is besides the point. There is a plethora of cheap fonts.
Not only would your idea kill creativity and bring font development to a standstill, it would put too much power in the hands of browsers which are already too powerful.
Everyone uses fonts, of course, and they're an important factor in how people perceive a brand. A lot of work goes into the subtleties that people don't necessarily notice but will definitely "feel."
Companies might start out paying these "off the shelf" prices, but everything in life is negotiable and they'll eventually work out a better deal. However, now the company has tied their brand identity to a typeface that is being licensed to them with a variable cost. So eventually, they may commission a custom typeface which could offer the potential of full ownership without perpetual fees.
Use the freaking font, pay none for it due to how such complexities for it are managed, wait for the font owner to find your site and try to do some legal paperwork against you and then see how all of that legal stuff is just not useful in whichever conuntry you are actually on...
Foundries don't license fonts for "desktop use" on seemingly generous terms out of the goodness of their hearts. It's because they have no choice. Letterforms are not copyrightable. The font file†, however, is. 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. The only leverage they have is controlling the distribution of the file. As it turns out, due to the way Web fonts work, this means they do have leverage on the Web—for technical reasons.
If the foundries had a choice, they wouldn't opt to license Web fonts more generously, they'd opt to extract more money out of the traditional uses.
(Note that this is written from the perspective of the way that copyright works in the US.)
† EDIT: I realized just now while brushing my teeth that this might lead to further mistaken understanding when put this way. So pretend instead that I said something like "what's in the font file", and pay particular attention to <https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23>.