Monotype foundry webinar on royalties

Nadine Chahine

Hello all,
We've been receiving a lot of questions about how Monotype will pay royalties on its new subscription service. We've also heard that they plan to give a webinar on the top on Wednesday so, in order to be helpful, we've publicly shared the questions that would help give transparency to the topic. I've posted them here:

https://twitter.com/arabictype/status/1663239667808862214?s=20

and I'm posting them here as well:

Qs to MT:

1- Can you please confirm that the foundries will actually receive 25% royalties on income from Monotype Fonts rather than 50%? Most subscriptions are simply bought online. Why is this not treated as Digital Commerce with 50% royalty rate as is standard?

2- Of the $199 for Individual Pro subscription, how do you split the income across the 40,000 fonts, the fonts that get synced, the 3 commercial fonts & all the webfonts used?

3- The commercial fonts can be swapped. How many times & how do you divide income across all the ones used?

4- If for example, fonts can be swapped 4 times a year. Will a font that was named for the whole year get the same income as one that was named for just one quarter?

5- How do you define fonts in the count of 3 commercial fonts allowed? Is it 3 font weight/styles or 3 families?

6- How are you able to guarantee to foundries that fonts that are synced are not being used “commercially”?

7- How do you define “commercially”? Why is desktop limited to prototyping but web font usage is exempt from that restriction?

8- On how many websites can the fonts be used? How many web fonts can be used in the Individual Pro plan? The info on the website is vague...

And finally, based on what has been shared online, your most recent MyFonts contract pushes foundries onto Monotype Fonts as well, where they will get less favourable conditions: 25% instead of 50%, of a likely reduced total income. 

Do they not have the right to choose?

Fontfruits

@Nadine Chahine Thank you for standing up and making all aware of these questions that SHOULD be asked and adressed clearly. I do worry though, that even if transparency is given as to royalty structures, that it would be very easy ( much easier than standard desktop license records for instance) to not pay some/any royalties where they are due in this scenario due to lack of transparency in how we SEE RECORDS of these transactions , and foundries would be none the wiser. So…

THIS is the MOST important question everyone SHOULD be asking : 

Will they have a system/ dashboard/ reports where you can track your fonts use in said subscriptions , live. With tallies of royalties as they accumulate.  

I imagine the answer would be no. 

And in there lies the rub. 

With me anyway. 

Nadine Chahine

Oooohhh that's a totally different angle to take... My questions are focused on royalty calculations rather than royalty tracking and reporting. You would hope, really, that they are able to:
1- track usage accurately
2- report it correctly
and
3- assign the right royalty calculations to it