I deal with a client’s request for a webfont licence. It is an institute of an university. They stated that they use a Microsoft cloud server (Azure) for the hosting of their websites.
In my licence terms it reads “[allowed is:] to link the webfonts to websites which are owned and controlled by licencee”, and also: “licence does not permit storage of the webfonts in places or under
conditions where unauthorized persons or third parties may gain access to the
fonts, without being licencees“.
They ask me if the storage on their MS-Azure server would be conforming with those terms and I think, that such a storage (not in-house server, but still, an ‘owned’ cloude space) would comply with the terms. However, I wonder if in such a case there may be any pitfalls or if, in the long term, certain precautions need to be effected in order to prevent unauthorized access to the fonts.
Has anyone experience with such a matter?
Comments
There are other ways of embedding fonts. But basically none of them are secure.
Lots of folks in the type business had concerns about web fonts and piracy. In the end, what has happened is, there is no serious copy protection for web fonts; they can be ripped off by pirates if they wish to go to the trouble to do so. They may need to translate from WOFF to other formats, but that’s not difficult.
Those terms seem… essentially contradictory, to me. No idea how a court would make sense of it.
Unless of course it is not a public web site, and the license covers all people with access to the site. But I assume not.
So, even if there were a way to protect font files served to the browser (like using Flash in the bad old days), the hosting provider still has access to all files, even the ones not served to browsers directly.
But the license says they can’t store “the webfonts in places or under conditions where unauthorized persons or third parties may gain access to the fonts, without being licencees.” It doesn’t stop at saying that the licensee shouldn’t authorize access.
You do not have to use anything external to, say, Google Chrome to get a WOFF font file out of a typical website. It is a dead-simple process. (At least, unless one adds more requirements; I suppose base64 encoded fonts are slightly harder, still.) The only caveat is, if you want to use the font on a Mac or Windows desktop, instead of as a web font, you do need to convert the WOFF. (What John Hudson referred to as the “garden fence” protection—doesn’t really stop anybody, but at least they have some reason to be aware that the file wasn’t meant for this usage.)
At least with extracting fonts from PDFs you need to start off with some tool other than Acrobat or Apple’s Preview. Requiring an unusual or dedicated tool for a normal person to achieve the result is a more challenging case.
Although it is very easy to "view source", it's quite another thing to steal the code. Image licensing has a greater challenge with the "save as" browser function.
Contradictions in font licenses are not uncommon. Having acquired a webfont license – even with this clause – a licensee would most likely be acting in good faith.
Likewise, no idea how it would play out in court.