Are the fonts you’re using correctly licensed?
Business of font management.
Fonts are tricky. On the one hand, they are the result of many thousands of hours of skilful work, created by someone who should be fairly compensated.
On the other hand, most of us have to consciously remind ourselves that fonts must be licensed, in almost exactly the same way as the software you use on your Mac or PC. In fact, fonts are even harder to keep track of because it’s not a simple binary ‘it’s licensed/it’s not licensed’ issue.
“Because fonts licences can be very specific about uses – embeddable in PDFs, for eBook use, as a web font, and so on – it’s important that users track not only each licence, but the parameters of the licence as well,” says Jim Kidwell, senior product manager at Extensis. “Going outside of licence parameters has definitely led to lawsuits in recent years.”
One of the most recent high-profile cases involved NBC Universal, which was hit with a $1.5 million suit because of its use of a font on some Harry Potter merchandise; the media company also faced a separate $2 million claim for insufficiently licensing fonts for its cable financial network, CNBC.
To be clear, cases of this scale are the exception rather than the rule, but with a survey from Extensis suggesting – unsurprisingly – that 80 per cent of designers don’t read font licences while half those surveyed admitted to sharing fonts, it’s clear some education could be useful. Here goes…
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