It had nothing to do with the laws of Canada. The license restricted
commercial use, so I presumed that would apply to the images created with the
font.
The last the author of FontForge, George Williams, checked, in Canada the
design of fonts can be protected for five years. I believe there is also a
kind of patent that can be applied to them. However, I am not a lawyer, and
cannot make any guarantees about this. If you actually wished to undertake
this, it would be best to buy exclusively from American foundries and ensure
that any legal issue relating to the typefaces be governed by American law.
Even so, the foundries would definitely not like that we're using a loophole
in the law to deprive them of income, and they'd at least try to sue. Every
proprietary foundry has its own EULA, some more restrictive than others.
You know those fonts like Webdings or Wingdings? Symbol fonts? A chess font
is like those, but with characters suitable for creating diagrams and
figurine notation. With the advent of SVGs and diagram creation programs,
that need is nearly obsolete.
