Copyright notice - deliverables placement - end user perspective

KP Mawhood

End user perspective, from our Marketing department: 

Marketing department said:

It is unclear to me where we need to place the copyright information, but in my view this would not be in any marketing materials we create. Marketers use licensed fonts all the time and I’d never seen a copyright notice for a font on marketing material. 

Questions:

1. Who is the author and steward of the Ubuntu Font License (UFL)? 
2. Any insight on marketing's query? For print titles, copyright notices / credit should be added to the prelims.

This is what the license says…

Ubuntu Font License (UFL) said:

[The copyright notice] can be included either as stand-alone text files, human-readable headers or in the appropriate machine-readable metadata fields within text or binary files as long as those fields can be easily viewed by the user.

Thanks!

JoyceKetterer

We require that credit be given to us if credit is being given generally.  I have no idea if that would actually be enforceable in a court.  It's hard to imagine a situation where there could be any consequence for failing to give us credit other than hurt feelings.  

Jens Kutilek

Right before your quote from the UFL, it says ‘Permission is hereby granted, [...] to propagate the Font Software, subject to the below conditions:’

So I think the copyright notice clause only applies if your marketing department distributes the font files, but not any materials using the fonts.

In case of embedding the fonts in some materials, e.g. a PDF file, the original copyright notice of the fonts would still be intact if somebody extracted the fonts from the PDF.

Khaled Hosny

Who is the author and steward of the Ubuntu Font License (UFL)?

Canonical. It is an odd license and Canonical for some reason felt that OFL was not good enough for them and started this “interim” license with the publicly stated goal of merging with OFL in the future, but that was 7 years ago and it is unclear if any such merging is going to ever happen.

James Puckett

JoyceKetterer said:

We require that credit be given to us if credit is being given generally.   

IIRC this is also what House does. I used to have a similar clause in my EULA. But I removed it because it’s just one more thing that makes EULAs seem overly complex. I feel that added complexity discourages reading the EULA at all.

KP Mawhood

@Khaled Hosny
Thanks, I've emailed him. Also interested by two of the bugs:

• Bug 1641478 – Clarify "must contain the above copyright notice"…
• Bug 1167425 – Ubuntu Fonts License is not a free software license

SiDaniels

I think Jens is correct, the notice is related to font redistribution not use. If you are redistributing the font (either loose or embedded in a document) you might want to include the license as a text file with the related files (PDF/fonts). 

JoyceKetterer

@James Puckett  You're correct, of course, about complexity being something to avoid but you're wrong about what constitutes complexity.  You're also probably wrong about what keeps people from reading EULAs.  

People don't read EULAs because they have a preconceived notion of what legal documents are and that they are hard to read.  Complexity doesn't keep people from reading EULAs because they largely don't get far enough to know if the document really is complex.

Complexity is amorphous clauses about "large volume" use or similar, rules with caveats or exceptions, hard to understand concepts, or disconnected ideas that require memorization.  

A simple request to credit the font designer is superfluous but it doesn't add complexity.  
The problem with complexity is that it is a tool used by crooks and scoundrels to trick people.  Everyone knows this and so even when those of us who mean well allow ourselves to be complex we sow mistrust.  Trust is very important in a negotiation so it's best not to throw it away before one even starts.  Since a lot of the people who read a font EULA are doing so as a first step in a license enforcement settlement the goal of a good EULA should be to make sure that person reads it and doesn't think it's complex and confusing.  

KP Mawhood

This just in from Mark Shuttleworth, on behalf of Canonical…

Thanks for raising the question!

We do not expect any credit in a document which uses the Ubuntu font, and there is no requirement to explicitly mention the font in any document which uses it. The license terms primarily impact font designers who wish to make their own version of the font, they do not constrain someone just using the font as it stands.