Hello,
the question is probably very basic and stupid, but I couldn’t find the answer.
How the font licensing works in the real life? When someone buys a font for 5 users, what stops him to use it for 5000 users? Or when someone just downloads a font for free, how can he get caught? As a beginner type designer, I don’t have a big experience with commercial fonts, and as I understand the license file included with the fonts is supposed to protect the foundrie, but it seems to be easily fakeable, shareable and just weak as an evidence for the law, or isn’t it? To my naive brain individual code / number for every sale is the only way to prove anything, but it seems to be imposible to do.
I probably misunderstand the system, could you please clarify how it all works?
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Nothing but the fear of a lawsuit.
In the past big corporations have been caught when they did things like launch national rebranding and/or advertising campaigns after buying a license for one person.
It’s mostly an honor system. Few type designers have the time or resources to police font use. Fortunately many font users accept that type design is something that deserves financial reward and accordingly they buy licenses.
Thats my perspective.
The way fonts function inside system software results in us having essentially no control. We can't even monitor (much less limit) the most basic kind of use of software - namely the creation of copies.
That said, the framing of this conversation feels missleading to me.
In practical terms, law suits are rare and license maintenance is fairly common. While we can't monitor every little use we can see the uses by big companies (because they are public) and it isn't espcially hard to work with them to correct any errors. This process is made easier if you write your license with an eye to it. That's where most of the money would be lost if we couldn't do anything about it. I don't sit up at night worrying about minor piracy. It's just the cost of doing business if you're going to license software.
That's direct sales. It is starting to be the case that you could plausibly make a living as an indie designer by just making your fonts available through various cloud distribution channels. We're not there yet but I can see it on the horizon. People who use desktop fonts through the Adobe sync system can't make unauthorized copies or embed the fonts. And it definitely provides us with sales leads for web and app embedding. You still have to rely on self reporting of traffic numbers for the web and app pricing but most violations don't come from people lying to your face so that doesn't worry me.
There is no good solution to piracy. It's just a fact. Licensing through a sync service is the most secure, but not a panacea. Sync'd fonts can be gotten to using all of the current schemes in use by vendors. While it takes a bit of work, they too are not actually secure. Which is why some have been pirated already.
The issue is akin to image piracy where if it can be displayed in a browser, it can be gotten to on the computer (no matter how the name(s) are obscured). The same applies to fonts. Once they are on the computer, they can be stolen.
It can be depressing/debilitating if one allows it to be. I'm currently in debilitating mode.
It’s sad in a way that we have to work like that, but I’m glad to hear that customers respect the license agreements!
If you ever run into the case of a huge corporation using your fonts without license, you’ll face that situation, but it’s not an everyday occurrence and not worth thinking about before you reach that point.
@Thierry Blancpain using without a license is very rare but using with not enough licensing is almost an every day occurrence. That said, I agree with your sentiment.
I got ONE sale in my home country and the buyer added a shitty cyrillic to it. Not to mention the agro I got from fellow designers for being mad e a fool. Fool me once...
Pirated fonts and especially fonts that you release for free must be of excellent quality. I like it better that some people are trading my original files, however they got their hands on them, instead of bad PDF extracts.
And I see no reason to release excellent quality, i.e. Pro fonts for free. Not only does a lot of time go into a pro font (obviously) , but, at the end of the day, that eats up from the profits of other professional font designers. The fields is so full that designs invariably start to look very similar, so a free font will be chosen over a similar-looking paid one.
Sometimes 1-2 weights could be released for free in the hope that the client will want to buy the whole family. But I don't see this happening in actuality. Maybe someone will correct me.