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.
- 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.