Fonts and the Law What are the legal issues surrounding fonts? Thomas Phinney introduces designers to what they need to know.
By Thomas Phinney Note: Consult your attorney for advice on any particular legal matter. No reader should act, or refrain from acting, on the basis of this article, without seeking advice from legal counsel in the relevant jurisdiction. Whether you use fonts as a graphic or web designer, or are perhaps starting to make fonts, understanding the legal issues around them is important. What are font lawsuits about, what legal protections do fonts have and how does it affect you—whether you use fonts or make them? Font lawsuits take many forms. Some are within a company, such as when Tobias Frere-Jones sued Jonathan Hoefler. Some are business disputes between companies in the font business, whether around distribution/relicensing deals, making derivative fonts and selling them (Adobe v SSi), making similar fonts (ITC v Monotype), or allowing fonts to be embedded in documents (Monotype v Adobe). Lawsuits over font “sharing” via websites are rare. Going after file sharers is like a game of whack-a-mole, offering minimal rewards. Most foundries stop after getting their fonts removed from the font-sharing website, if even that. One egregious case that did go to court in Canada was someone using the online alias Apostrophe getting sued by a group of type designers and foundries in the early 2000s. Afterwards, Emigre’s Rudy VanderLans told Fontzone’s Clive Bruton, “We have never lost any of these types of lawsuits. Granted, many of the lawsuits to protect our font software are settled out of court. Our goal is to stop people such as Apostrophe. We’re in it to protect our work, not to clog up the legal system and/or fatten the wallets of lawyers. This settlement gave us exactly what we asked for.” Such “piracy” can have consequences besides lawsuits. In the United States, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), copyright holders can complain to infringers’ internet service providers. Repeat infringement after warnings can lead to loss of internet service—although this is rare. Filed lawsuits are rare, but getting contacted over unlicensed font usage is very common.” Whether you’re using fonts or making them, the main risks are around underlicensed or unlicensed font use. Only one or two such lawsuits a year reach public awareness, but in countless more cases, a foundry or its lawyer contacts users about improper usage of fonts, and they settle out of court. Often, these users are either partly legitimate customers, or just made a mistake. For example, in 2010, the French anti-piracy agency Hadopi’s new logo, created by an outside design firm, used a Porchez font that had been created for the exclusive use of France Télécom, and couldn’t legally be used by anyone else. Designers’ Lesson: Track your usage and segregate any fonts you have only because of a specific client, perhaps by utilizing a font-management app. Remember that few licenses, aside from open source, allow you to give the fonts to third parties doing design work for you—sometimes with an exception for output services. License wording and terms are hard for foundries; they have to decide whether to keep things simple and generous, or to charge extra for additional rights. Emigre, for one, has an especially modular and clear license where users pay separately for various different areas of use. Proceeding to an actual lawsuit is expensive for everyone. In most cases, the additional licensing fees involved, which go from users to foundries, are small compared to potential legal fees on both sides. And that’s not counting time on both sides, lost from actual work. This is why filed lawsuits are rare, but getting contacted over unlicensed font usage is very common. Said contact may not even be an actual problem! In a previous job, my company got a letter from a well-known foundry about what they thought was two cases of unlicensed font usage—but they were mistaken. Designers’ Lesson: Keep records of your font licensing, as well as who you hired for outside design work. With practice, you can scan a license quickly. If you don’t like it, don’t license under those terms.” Two foundries that are especially active in pursuing unlicensed or underlicensed font usage have told me—under condition of anonymity—that they might get as much revenue from enforcement (which one of them called “retroactive license sales”) as from normal licensing! This relies on dedicated staff as well as automated bots that can scan for font usage in web pages and posted PDFs. Sam Berlow, previously general manager of Font Bureau and chief executive officer of Type Network, says “license enforcement ‘can’ be a substantial percentage of foundry income. It can also be soul-killing and maddening. I recommend outsourcing it whenever possible.” Berlow suggests foundries take a gradual escalation approach to license enforcement, starting with a company-to-company letter before involving lawyers. What’s in a font license? Most, except open source, cover a specific number of users or computers. Desktop licenses often exclude or limit web fonts, while web font pricing often scales based on usage. Incorporating fonts into an app is often extra. Some font licenses charge extra for various other things, such as use in advertising, in logos or on T-shirts. Many foundries don’t allow modifications, or require that they do modi cations themselves. One foundry’s license even says that you may not use its fonts for a political or religious purpose without additional permission! A few offer some sort of trial use. Designers’ Lesson: Font license generalizations are just that—font licenses can differ and usually do, which is why you must read them! Fonts from the same foundry or under the same open-source license will generally have the same license, which helps. With practice, you can scan a license quickly. If you don’t like it, don’t license under those terms. I know this may sound excessive. I don’t usually read software licenses... except for fonts, because there’s a real chance of the license not allowing what I want to do. You need to read font licenses, too. Kinds of Legal Protection for Fonts The end-user license agreement (EULA) is a legal contract that says what you can and cannot do with the fonts. Except for fonts you have designed yourself or commissioned, or those from “warez” sites with no license at all, most fonts on your computer are licensed to you, not owned by you—even open-source fonts. Copyright is contentious for fonts in the United States, but the companies’ making fonts, and their lawyers, have long acted as if fonts are protected by copyright. The details are complicated. In 1976, a new Copyright Act was enacted by Congress that specifically excluded fonts from copyright protection. In the mid-’90s, Cynthia Hollandsworth Batty led the type community in convincing the Copyright Office that digital fonts might be considered software, and be treated as such for copyright. So instead of showing what the font looks like, a US copyright application for a font consists of text-format code dump representing everything, even glyph shapes. Since then, the US Copyright Office’s Compendium of Practices has said that a computer program that generates a particular typeface or “typefont” may be registered, but not the typeface/typefont itself (§723). However, as intellectual property lawyer Karen Shatzkin explains it, “computer programs are entitled to copyright only if they contain new creative elements, which the Copyright Office is not equipped to judge, and your registration is only prima facie evidence. Prevailing in litigation may well require that you prove its entitlement to copyright, which, even if you succeeded, would cost a fortune.” And, of course, this would protect the font-file-as-software, not the appearance. For more confusion, the Copyright Office in 2018 started sending letters to some font copyright applicants saying copyright required applicants to explicitly claim that they had in fact input the code as text to create font glyph shapes (as opposed to using a drawing interface, as is nearly universally done). But copyright registrations for fonts-as-software have quietly resumed since, and neither the Office nor multifoundry lawyer Frank Martinez, who led objections to this, would comment on the record, leaving the situation murky at best. >From a software perspective, this—typing code versus drawing vectors on the computer—is an arbitrary distinction with no difference in the output. Indeed, as chief executive officer of FontLab at the time, I consulted with FontLab engineering vice president Yuri Yarmola, and he promptly put the “source” text-based glyph editing mode into FontLab VI. You could then edit any glyph either as source code text or via the visual editor—and changes made in either affect the other, in case anyone wanted to convince the Copyright Office as to the irrelevance of the distinction. Why do foundries badly want copyright to apply to fonts? Copyright is automatic and inherent in authorship, without even requiring registration, and copyright on new works generally lasts for 70-plus years, depending on the country, author’s lifetime, etc. Additionally, registering one’s copyright has the advantage in the United States that it can make infringers liable for “statutory damages”—a range of cost per work, regardless of the actual damages (actual loss to the copyright owner). Design rights protect the abstract design of the typeface; they are the only legal protection that protects the appearance alone. Design rights vary in form by country. In the United States, design rights take the form of a “design patent,” which is a different category than the usual “utility patent.” Design patents only last for fourteen or fifteen years and must be actively applied for, with noticeable fees on top of any lawyers’ fees, and are only relevant in the United States. Result? Font design patents are uncommon; Adobe routinely applies for them, but few others do. Unlike copyright, though, there is no question that design patents can be applied to fonts. In fact, US design patent number one was for a font, issued to George Bruce of the Bruce Type Foundry in 1842! In the European Union, registering a “Community design” gives protection for up to 25 years. In some circumstances, an “unregistered Community design” may also be protected, for a period of three years. What does it mean that design rights protect appearance? If you sell a font in the United States that looks too much like Adobe’s Hypatia Sans (designed primarily by me, but owned by Adobe), it could infringe Adobe’s US design patent—even if you didn’t start with Hypatia Sans’s font code or outlines. Trademark requires registration, protecting just the name, in the registered domains. Thus there are three active US trademarks on Arial in different domains: one for the font, but also for climbing/mountaineering ropes and a wireless call system. Anyone can claim a trademark (™), but only registered trademarks can use ®. Trademarks last forever as long as one uses the name in commerce and pays renewal fees. Which protections matter? Font lawsuits often rely on as many areas as can be brought to bear, including copyright and trademark—and design rights, where applicable. But the complexity and uncertainties of US copyright for fonts has led a few lawyers and foundries—such as Shatzkin and her longtime former client Darden Studio—to conclude that both foundries and users are best off relying solely on a fair but highly enforceable license. ca Thomas Phinney is a type designer who has made fonts for Google and Adobe, and is proprietor of Font Detective LLC, where he investigates forged documents involving fonts that did not yet exist, and other actual crimes against typography. He has been cited on font forensics in media from The Washington Post to the BBC; consulted by organizations ranging from PBS to the US Treasury; and given sworn affidavits in at least six countries. Phinney was on the board of ATypI from 2004–2020. Previously, he was chief executive officer of FontLab and a product manager at Extensis and Adobe. Phinney has an MS in printing from the Rochester Institute of Technology and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley. KR Nawaz sharif prosecution wrt doc of antedated acts is only a minor issue for him to lose. As a matter of fact MS and many USA companies take the volunteers to test their products including the fonts, for many years before releasing them to the markets; I was one among MS when they released a font long ago. So had I drafted a doc before their marketing periods, totally it cannot be held untruth; also in USA licensing is monitored even if as an Indian staying for long in USA, you are also being monitored while using the fonts; in USA licence is a must; on the contrary including India, many nations are allowed to use freely the fonts as an education Medium and let freely; but the traders misuse them and make money. So even such non-marketed fonts could be given free or sold by the computer trader to you which you could be using even before it is marketed; and even if you point out the source, THAT SOURCE may deny such also. Hence Nawaz removal was vbased on font is an unacceptable theme where politicians come out of brickwalls so easily Thank you K Rajaram IRS 241024 ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: 'venkat giri' via iyer123 <[email protected]> Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2024 at 22:56 Subject: [iyer123] MICROSOFT CALBRI FONT GATE...SCANDAL To: Iyer <[email protected]> *Respected sir/s,* *SUBJECT:** A MICROSOFT FONT LEAD to **DOWNFALL.* *CALIBRI** (/k**əˈ**li**ː**bri/) is a digital sans-serif typeface family in the humanist or modern style**.* *Calibri** is a modern sans serif family with subtle rounding on stems and corners. It features real italics, small caps, and multiple numeral sets. Its proportions allow high impact in tightly set lines of big and small text alike.* ** ** ***Calibri is a font family that's commonly used in Microsoft Office documents, resumes, and other projects: * *Calibri was the default font in Microsoft Office 2007 and later**, replacing* *Times New Roman in Word and Arial in PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and WordPad. It was a popular choice for Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and Excel spread sheets. * *Calibri is a good choice for resumes because it's easy to read, has a professional appearance, and is compatible across platforms. * *In January 2024, Microsoft replaced Calibri with Aptos as the new default font for Microsoft Office. * *For almost 15 years, Calibri has reigned as the default and therefore dominant font choice for Microsoft systems.* *When reading text on a screen, serif fonts (Garamond and Times New Roman) are harder to read than sans-serif fonts (Calibri and Arial). Since Word is a program for writing on computers and users read text from a monitor, it made sense to ditch the Times New Roman serif font as standard.* *Calibri replaced **Times New Roman at a time there was a shift from CRT to LCD screens. The changing default type was a response to the new way images were brought to the screen. History might be repeating itself if we are expecting a new type of display soon.* *Calibri replaced Times New Roman as the suite's default font in Office 2007, at a time before "Retina" displays and when 1024×768 and 1280×800 screens were still the norm—a Clear Type font, Calibri itself was a response to the shift from CRT to LCD screens.* * Microsoft made the decision to switch to Aptos Narrow as the default font for Microsoft Office because it is a modern, clean, and legible font that is optimized for on-screen reading. It was chosen based on extensive research and testing to improve the overall user experience.* *CORRUPTION, PANAMA PAPERS and **A Font* *A key piece of evidence in the corruption investigation against the former Pakistan prime minister and his children was **Microsoft’s Calibri font.* *The PM’s daughter, Maryam Nawaz, **used Calibri** to forge documents about illegal offshore companies, Nielsen and Nescoll Limited, which were flagged in the Panama Papers.* *The Calibri font wasn’t publicly available to computer users worldwide until **2007* *A key piece of evidence in the corruption investigation against the prime minister and his children was **Microsoft’s Calibri font.* *Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, has been forced to leave after he was disqualified from office by the Supreme Court.* *The documents submitted by Maryam Nawaz — purportedly created in 2006 — were typed in the Calibri font.* *But there was only one problem.* *The font wasn’t publicly available to computer users worldwide until 2007; according to the investigation team’s leaked report.* *Nawaz Sharif resigned on July 28, 2017, after Pakistan’s Supreme Court ruled he was no longer fit for office.** His downfall followed after an investigation into his family’s wealth triggered by the release of the Panama Papers in 2016. These documents leaked from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, exposed various shell companies and tax-evasion strategies linked to some of the world's wealthiest individuals.* * Sharif's family wealth came under scrutiny when the Panama Papers connected his children to offshore companies used to purchase residential properties in London. Although the prime minister's name did not appear in the documents, his three children were mentioned. The family’s undisclosed wealth led to widespread protests in Pakistan and speculation that these companies served as fronts for money laundering.* * The Sharif family maintained that the London properties were acquired legally. They claimed the funds for the purchases originated from family businesses in the United Kingdom and the Gulf, as well as from the sale of Gulf Steel Mills in the United Arab Emirates.* *Investigation Pivoted Around Calibri Font* * In response to the allegations, a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) was established to examine the family’s financial dealings. * *Maryam Sharif submitted documents intended to demonstrate her innocence. * *Pakistan's court-appointed investigators sent these documents to a lab for analysis, where **experts identified the font discrepancy.* *One expert noted that the **documents were forged and **most likely created at a later point in time,** as in when it came under scanner. * *“Calibri [font] was not commercially available before **January 31, 2007**, **and as such, neither of the originals of the certified declarations is correctly dated and happens to have been created at some later point in time,” Radley Forensic Document Laboratory expert Robert W Radley said on documents submitted to him by the JIT.* *'FONTGATE SCANDAL’* *The discrepancy in the font used in documents dated to 2006 led to allegations of an attempted cover-up by the Sharif family and sparked the "Fontgate" scandal. * * Supporters of the Sharif family countered that the font was available as a "beta version" as early as 2004. The debate quickly escalated into a political battleground, with both sides waging a proxy war on the Wikipedia page dedicated to Calibri. The page was edited 150,000 times in just two days, prompting Wikipedia to lock down the entry to prevent further changes.* * The defence presented by the accused Sharifs, claiming they used a beta version of the Calibri font, was **discredited by the font's inventor himself**. Lucas de Groot, the creator of Calibri, told BBC that beta versions were typically only used by "tech geeks" and not by ordinary companies or government officials.* * The JIT’s report accused Nawaz Sharif of concealing assets, underreporting his wealth, and falsifying evidence. The investigation highlighted “significant gaps and disparities among the known and declared sources of [the family’s] income and wealth.” The Supreme Court of Pakistan ruled Nawaz Sharif ineligible to hold public office, leading to his disqualification as Prime Minister.* *Regards* *V.Sridharan* *Trichy* -- To go to your groups page on the web, login to your gmail account and then click on https://groups.google.com/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "iyer123" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/iyer123/1095786014.3555920.1729704394217%40mail.yahoo.com <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/iyer123/1095786014.3555920.1729704394217%40mail.yahoo.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. 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