Hello,
I have been altering open source fonts for a personal project, and I was wondering what to do with the Copyright and Designer metadata. Do I change them to my own, or do I keep them as they were? Some extra information is probably needed: All the fonts I am altering are licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, and one (Source Serif) has a reserved font name.
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2) Original or Modified Versions of the Font Software may be bundled,
redistributed and/or sold with any software, provided that each copy
contains the above copyright notice and this license. These 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.
So you must include the original copyright notice, and not replace it with your own. If your fonts include novel content that is not derived from the existing fonts, then you could add a second copyright notice indicating that parts of the font are your original work.
If you were combining multiple OFL fonts, or parts thereof, into a single modified font, then you would need to include all of the relevant copyright notices.
With regard to Designer metadata, this is not a legal requirement for inclusion in any font, but it is polite to retain reference to the original designer(s) as well a providing useful information to users. So, for example, you might say ‘Designed by X, based on prior work by Y’.
This pertains to Matthew Butterick’s case against AI.