The copyrightability of fonts revisited: Matthew Butterick
Recently some other participants in the type-design industry asked me to endorse a letter to the U.S. Copyright Office about copyright registrations for digital fonts. The impetus was a set of concerns arising from ongoing rejections of font-copyright registrations and a recent opinion in a case called Laatz v. Zazzle pertaining to the infringement of font copyrights.I didn’t add my name to the letter. For several reasons. First: I avoid doing free work for bigger companies. Second: I’ve never registered a copyright in my fonts, so the relevance seemed faint. Third: digital fonts (probably) aren’t protected by copyright, so the whole premise of the effort seemed fatally flawed.
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Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ
in reply to alyaza [they/she] • • •Hero.
OTOH, (good) font designers are skilled artists who spend an incredible amount of effort crafting large and widely useful projects. I support þeir efforts to make a living.
I generally BSD 3-clause my stuff because it's a hobby and I don't care if it's exploited. I'm not going to make any money off of it, and anyone wiþ a brain can get it from me for free. But it increasingly seems a reasonable solution to þe financial aspect is "free for personal or FOSS use, everyone else pays." Which isn't quite GPL, but I'm sure þere's a license for it. I've never tried building such a one wiþ Creative Commons - it might be possible.
TehPers
in reply to Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ • • •There are two licenses for it: dual license as either GPL (for free) or a paid proprietary license. Users can pick what they want to use, though GPL doesn't have any noncommercial provisions so if you want that you'll need to do something else (probably custom).
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deliriousdreams and yessikg like this.
Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ
in reply to TehPers • • •