Say someone purchases one of your fonts with the file name “font-name.woff”. The customer renames the font to “company-name.woff” when they upload it to their website with the purpose of either obfuscating the fonts they are using or else making the font look like a custom corporate face. Does this violate the license in any way?
I’ve noticed a trend lately of companies doing this and wondered how type designers felt about the practice...
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Did this happen to you?
I thought maybe type designers would be against this, but I haven’t seen this explicitly mentioned in any license.
Most font licenses forbid making any changes to the font files, which I think most people would interpret as being inclusive of changing the name.
In an effort to accommodate a reasonable need, the Darden Studio web embedding licensing permits the licensee to subset the fonts. In order to do so they will need to save their changes, and we expressly require that they retain our names for the font files. To be clear, we expressly do not permit this for licensees who don't have a web addendum.
I hope I've been a fraction as helpful to you as your work has been to me. Please let me know if you have follow-up questions.
I imagine this is often done as a sneaky way to use unlicensed fonts. Like if I see a designer’s portfolio site using a font that looks exactly like Circular, but it’s named something else, that just seems sketchy to me. And even with a file rename, the font’s metadata will usually still show the original type designer’s name/copyright.
And thank you, Joyce—that is super helpful. I feel like more foundries should probably include retaining file names as part of the license. And that’s interesting about file renaming being considered file modification. Not sure how that would be legally interpreted.
Anyway, I want to be able to tell other designers “hey, you probably shouldn’t be doing that”, but without an explicit license violation it sounds like it is a gray area.
In that case, the person developing the site simply needs to change what the font-family is being declared as in the @font-face. Like so:
With that being said, I do not condone the practice—I just don't know if that in particular is a violation of many people's EULA. I do wonder if you could legally write that into the license though?
Quite a few website build systems will change any file name to accommodate their internal logic, anyway. So GT Walsheim may turn into gl48nm992liqapghaksnbbz1.woff2, and I don’t think it’s purposeful of a EULA to forbid such cases.
Most such very detail-oriented rules seem to me like they just lead to EULAs that are super hard to abide to by customers. I’d rather have customers abide by very general rules that are clear than to list every possible case and exceptions in a EULA.
The font-family descriptor value following an @font-face at-rule is really just the developer's way of establishing a common CSS value that can be subsequently used as needed within the HTML document. In other words, it's a basically a nickname that can be used throughout the document to reference the actual font; it's not an attempt to change the name of the font itself.
But yeah, I think that any reasonable person would consider what you describe not permitted under our license:
- f. You may open the Font Software in a font or text editor solely in order to look at it. You are prohibited from decompiling or disassembling the Font Software for the purpose of converting, porting, adapting or modifying it in any manner. If you want to modify a glyph, “swap” alternates or move characters to different Unicode positions, it is subject to Darden Studio’s permission, and design work must be done either by Darden Studio or by someone approved by it. Any violation of this provision will render you liable for damages calculated on the basis of Darden Studio’s highest charges for font software development and the license for the use.
However, next EULA edit I'm adding "for the avoidance of doubt, under no circumstances may you change the name of the fonts or font files".