FULA vs EULA

Stuart Sandler

One of best comments after my font licensing talk at Typecon was a comment that we as an industry should stop referring to what we do as selling 'fonts' and instead refer to it as selling 'font licenses' made by @Nadine.

I have noticed more recently after some online research that many organizations (Creative Market, Typekit) have replaced the traditional EULA with basically a large FAQ whereby the actual EULA language is buried elsewhere within the terms of site use or sometimes just not visible at all leaving the FAQ as the controlling agreement.

It occurred to me that one of the ways we can start to evolved the mindset of licensing vs purchasing fonts is by changing the name of the document itself from End User License Agreement to Font Use License Agreement which could evolved into something between a EULA and an FAQ provided its clear and would be enforceable in a court of law.

This would represent a change to the public and may make them sit up and take notice of an evolution in the way we approach licensing as both sellers and to buyers.

I'm curious what you all think of this approach.

James Puckett

Renaming the agreement doesn’t change the real problem—people have been trained to ignore license agreements. This isn’t the fault of font companies—the font industry generally does a good job of presenting an readable EULA (at least in a literal sense), as opposed to 5,000 words in a 80x10 character box like software companies often do.

I think it would make more sense to focus on plainly worded license agreements like Matthew Butterick’s or Jackson Cavanaugh’s. Or use an antagonistic license nobody will read, but explain it clearly like Commercial Type. We definitely need to abandon what lazy people like me do, dumping licenses full of legalese on the web site. As long as the agreements remain complex contracts full of boilerplate people will treat them as no different from all the EULAs they run into on a daily basis from Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, eBay, PayPal, etc. 

I know that some of the IP lawyers who serve the industry insist that we have to use antagonistic, burt ironclad, agreements. But maybe the business of getting a nice settlement thanks to an ironclad EULA would be trumped by the business of selling more licenses because users can actually understand them,

KP Mawhood

I've not read Butterick's license before. Very clever use of "my fonts" – emphasizes the IP ownership exceptionally well, particularly with use of repetition.