Perplexing EULA

André G. Isaak
André G. Isaak Posts: 634
in Type Business
This question is more one of curiousity than anything else.

I just ran across what struck me as an incredibly peculiar line in a EULA and was wondering if anyone had seen anything similar elsewhere and exactly what its actual legal ramifications would be.

This is an excerpt from the Katarad Aksorn Thai Collection EULA

…
Katatrad™ font license covers only Thai glyphs. We hold no responsible to all the Latin characters. To complete your Latin license, please purchase user license from the original source.
…

Of course, there is absolutely no mention anywhere of the source of the latin glyphs.

Thoughts?

Comments

  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,898
    Wow. That certainly is odd. Bizarre, even.

    Although speculation is tempting, and one can imagine many scenarios in which licenses and/or copyright are being violated… the obvious thing to do is simply ask the vendor what the sources of the Latin glyphs are, for the fonts in question.

    I will note that most open source fonts presumably wouldn’t be legitimate sources under their normal license terms. The ubiquitous Open Font License requires derivative works to also be OFL-licensed. Some more permissive licenses such as Apache would be OK… only they wouldn’t require purchasing a license from anyone else!
  • André G. Isaak
    André G. Isaak Posts: 634
    edited September 2021
    Thomas Phinney said:
    Although speculation is tempting, and one can imagine many scenarios in which licenses and/or copyright are being violated… the obvious thing to do is simply ask the vendor what the sources of the Latin glyphs are, for the fonts in question.

    Asking would be an obvious course of action. But as I said, this was mostly curiosity — this is a EULA a ran across while browsing their website, not the EULA for a font I've actually licensed.

    Copyright violation struck me as unlikely. I know nothing about Katarad other than that they’re a subsidiary of Cadson Demak, and while I know very little about Cadson Demak, nothing which I do know about them suggests they are anything other than a reputable company, so I doubt they'd risk shipping fonts with unlicensed latin glyphs included.

    Interestingly, though, I discovered while looking into this that at least one of the Katatrad fonts (Anugrom) is available through TypeKit, and the latin glyphs (which aren't shown on the Katatrad website) match the Thai ones very well suggesting that either the Thai face is a Siamization (if that's even a word) of an existing roman face, or that the glyphs were designed together.

    I'm almost 100% certain that the TypeKit EULA doesn't warn users to "please make sure that this license actually covers all of the glyphs in a font before using them". But I opened the font in FL5 using the "open installed…" option, and sure enough, the above text is also contained in the font itself though most TypeKit users will never actually see it.
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,898
     :# 
  • KP Mawhood
    KP Mawhood Posts: 296
    edited September 2021
    A quick search shows that a version of Katarad's Sarabun (by the same designer Suppakit Chalermlarp) is available on Google Fonts, and with an earlier version being part of a set of National Fonts sponsored by the Thai government (announced 2010). Specifically, Wiki states " public agencies were ordered to use these fonts, especially "TH Sarabun PSK", in their state papers." 

    So, my guess would be that the EULA is advising users to find the Latin version most appropriate to their needs (which may have different sources / licenses).

    There are a few fonts like this out in the wild (and I'm sure I've stumbled across similar clauses). Different license terms for newer versions of the same font are not unusual.

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