Altering open source fonts?

Typofactory
Typofactory Posts: 56
in Type Business
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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Comments

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,186
    See clause 2 of the OFL:

    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’.
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,207
    edited July 2023
    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.
    Copying “parts thereof” is known as the “scraping” that AI synths do.
    This pertains to Matthew Butterick’s case against AI.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,186
    Copying “parts thereof” is known as the “scraping” that AI synths do.
    I was thinking in terms of incorporating some rather than all of the glyphs from one libre font into another. When merging glyphs from multiple fonts into a single font, it is necessary to include the relevant copyright notices for all the sources, even if only a single glyph is taken from a particular font, hence ‘parts thereof’.

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