My clients keeps complaining about the fact that the capital G in their corporate font is hard to read because it does not have a horizontal bar in the cap G. I simply draw a rectangle on large headlines. Is it unlawful or unethical to alter the font by creating an alternate glyph with that bar?
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I've been contacted by customers for minor alterations like this and never charged the client for it. Sometimes the altered character will get added to the official release as an alternate. In some cases, the character they were looking for already existed in the font as an alternate that they didn't know about. Of course, if changes are extensive, I'll invoice for it, but nine out of ten times, the requested changes are related to crossbars: alter the length, add, or remove.
These change requests are valuable to me because they help me decide which unorthodox designs warrant a traditional alternate. Or in more stark typeface designs, the opposite.
I’d like to turn this question around: Is it ethical for a designer or publisher of a font to demand that a user not alter the font in any way? And what, exactly, constitutes an alteration? The “offense” that’s usually discussed in this regard, as it is in this thread, is the alteration of a letterform. But what about the sort of alteration of the font designer’s original intent that I, myself, find an egregious debasement of the design: the use of tracking or unequal scaling or insufficient line spacing that may render a font unrecognizable? These have no bearing on the font, per se, but have much to do with how the font is perceived by readers. Does any EULA try to limit that sort of thing? If not, what real use is the EULA in regard to design integrity?
A related question: Has there ever been an actual court case regarding the design-related terms for font use as described in a EULA?
To be clear, these hypotheticals make certain assumptions: the font(s) in question have been lawfully purchased; the user alteration is for singular personal or professional use only, not for resale.
Note: I refer to retail fonts not custom work
Joyce, it was partly rhetorical, especially the question about (the nonexistent) court cases. I post something along these lines every time the topic comes up. What I’m railing against is bullying. One can make all sorts of outlandish demands in an agreement, even if they are just so much hot air. Unfortunately, many people are unaware that contracts, or portions of contracts, that “look” legal may not stand up in court. Fortunately, in U.S. law we have the doctrine of severability, which means that if one section of an agreement is determined to be illegal, the remainder stays enforceable.
What is serious in a EULA? The number and nature of permitted installations, protection from theft, and prohibition of resale and commercialization, and perhaps a couple of other things. Modification for private use is de facto legal, by virtue of the fact that the sort of egregious modification I mentioned above is clearly beyond the scope of any EULA, as is the turning of font characters into editable outlines in many of the major applications in which fonts are used. Moreover, there’s this: no one is willing to spend the money to test it in court, not even the largest organizations. There’s nothing to be gained.
I think large volume licensing is dumb. In most cases of high volume there's either embedding, a bunch or users, or it kinda doesn't matter for our bottom line (like books). Things like logo (where the price is tied to the value of the brand) and broadcast make sense if you think you're licensing IP... but then you should work hard to keep the client of thinking of your font as software (good luck).
I sometimes get customers who think our web and app licensing is high compared to others. When I point out that we don't charge extra for all the stuff that's at the basic level they are often floored that others do charge for that. And I think this explains why others have so much more trouble enforcing their licenses than I do. No one thinks I set a trap by not allowing embedding. Most customers, who think fonts are software, think broadcast licensing and large volume are traps.
That sounds quite a bit like Right to Repair laws (at least in some US jurisdictions) and it brings up an intriguing issue if such would conflict with current IP and or software laws in the US or other jurisdictions.