Is anyone aware of any instances of copyright ownership issues of fonts related to the creation/generation of fonts by open source software and/or 3rd party software? Is it possible that an open source macro or extension with a restrictive license could compromise the copyright and ownership of a final generated font? Just curious if anything regarding this topic has ever come up in the history of digital type design.
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This reminds me of a crazy debate I had a few years ago on Typophile with a guy who was convinced that Adobe was claiming ownership of everything that anyone ever sent to a PostScript output device just because he noticed an Adobe copyright notice in the PostScript file that was sent to the device. I guess he imagined that one day Adobe would announce that it owned every document ever printed in the last 30 years and demand payment for copyright infringement or something.
I'm not saying you are crazy, but if this were an issue, it would have come to light a long time ago.
With more recent tools, I have noticed that the AFDKO, which most modern font editors use to generate OpenType fonts, leaves some info in the version string to help with quality control presumably. Usually looks something like this:
I have noticed that ttfautohint by default adds something, but I can't seem to find an example.
It's possible to suppress or strip out either of these, but I think they are there to be helpful when troubleshooting font problems, not for any legal shenanigans.
An old example is GNU Bison. The license for that project was updated to provide additional permission (an 'exception') to the permissions in the regular GNU GPL to allow for the output to be licensed under terms incompatible with the GPL.
The Bison manual explains:
The distribution terms for Bison-generated parsers permit using the parsers in nonfree programs. Before Bison version 2.2, these extra permissions applied only when Bison was generating LALR(1) parsers in C. And before Bison version 1.24, Bison-generated parsers could be used only in programs that were free software.
The other GNU programming tools, such as the GNU C compiler, have never had such a requirement. They could always be used for nonfree software. The reason Bison was different was not due to a special policy decision; it resulted from applying the usual General Public License to all of the Bison source code.
The main output of the Bison utility—the Bison parser implementation file—contains a verbatim copy of a sizable piece of Bison, which is the code for the parser’s implementation. (The actions from your grammar are inserted into this implementation at one point, but most of the rest of the implementation is not changed.) When we applied the GPL terms to the skeleton code for the parser’s implementation, the effect was to restrict the use of Bison output to free software.
We didn’t change the terms because of sympathy for people who want to make software proprietary. Software should be free. But we concluded that limiting Bison’s use to free software was doing little to encourage people to make other software free. So we decided to make the practical conditions for using Bison match the practical conditions for using the other GNU tools.
This exception applies when Bison is generating code for a parser. You can tell whether the exception applies to a Bison output file by inspecting the file for text beginning with “As a special exception…”. The text spells out the exact terms of the exception.
So yes, it is indeed possible that a macro or extension with a copyleft license could form a combined and thus derivative work with a generated font.
But it is much more likely that a macro or extension with a restrictive license would effect generated fonts, because libre software is subject only to copyright licenses, while restricted software is typically subject both to copyright and to contracts; it is easy to make a contract term that says all rights adhering to work that is output by the software is assigned to the software owner, and when combined with the now-common arbitration terms in restricted software contracts, you will have no recourse in the public courts.
Such clauses are much more common in software licenses that feed publishing networks.