License Infringement and Font Burner
I continue to be amazed by font comapanies that cry “Infringement” when they learn about sIFR. I have decided to make public all email correspondence with people who request to have their “free” fonts removed from Font Burner. Here is one from the protective folks at K-Type followed by my response…
On Jan 10, 2009, at 5:12 AM, Keith Bates wrote the following in an email titled “K-TYPE LICENCE INFRINGEMENT:”
Adrian,
I have not received a reply to the request I sent a few weeks ago asking you to remove my K-Type fonts that appear on your FontBurner site. Please remove them immediately!
I was initially rather surprised that someone who purports to be helping font designers would not even credit each font foundry whose fonts are being used within FontBurner.
More importantly with regard to K-Type, you are failing to acknowledge or publicize the terms of our Licensing Agreement which allows K-Type ‘Freebies’ to be used without a licence ‘for personal use only’.
The great problem with FontBurner is that although you are supplying this software free, it will be utilised by commercial concerns who will assumed that you have commercial clearance to use our fonts. You have not sought or been granted such permission. Indeed, the K-Type Licence Agreement, clearly visible on our website and available in the documentation within all current versions of K-Type fonts, clearly states that ‘Freebies used for commercial purposes must be licensed at the same rate as Pay Fonts’. Furthermore, K-Type fonts used within software products such as you are offering, need to be covered by an Enterprise Licence.
I trust you will quickly remove our intellectual property from your web site and FontBurner product and will advise me as soon as this is done. I attach a full list of K-Type ‘Freebies’ below.
Failure to comply with this instruction will result in legal action.
Keith Bates
K-Type Freebies (Free for Personal Use)
3×5
Alex
Anna
Collegiate
Dalek
Designer Block
Digitalis
Flatpack
Future Imperfect
Gommogravure
Greetings
Insecurity
Kato
Klee Capscript
Lexia Readable
Magical Mystery Tour
MailArt
MailArt Graphics
Mailart Rubberstamp
Mandatory
Max
Ming
Norton
Pix-L
Ray Johnson
Roadway
Sans Culottes
Snippletweak
Subway Ticker
Susanna
This Corrosion
Victor Moscoso
Wanda
Waverley
On Jan 10, 2009, at 12:02 PM, Adrian Hanft wrote:
Keith,
Somehow I missed your email from a few weeks ago. It either got filtered as spam or I missed it over Christmas when I was using my phone for email. Apologies.
Font Burner tries to make it simple for anyone to use freely available fonts on their websites. Since we have so many fonts in the system it is currently a little hard to credit the font designers as well as we would like. Hopefully we can improve that in the future because we really do respect font designers and thank them when they share their property freely. While we believe that it is within our legal rights to post any and all fonts on Font Burner, we try to respect the wishes of font owner such as yourself who ask us to remove a font. So, as a courtesy to you, I have turned off the following fonts within the Font Burner system:
Future Imperfect
Greetings
Lexia
Mailart rubber stamp
Mandatory
Susanna
This corrosion
As a point of clarity, I am curious how K-Type views sIFR in general? Do you restrict the use of sIFR completely with your fonts? I assume you realize that any time a sIFR file is posted online technically anyone could link to it and use it on their site, commercial or otherwise. If you demand that Font Burner remove the sIFR files off our server you are basically saying that it is illegal for anyone to use your fonts in sIFR even if they have purchased the font. That’s just something I want you to think about and I would be curious to know your thoughts in that matter.
Also, I want to alert you to the fact that I will be posting all our correspondence publicly and unedited on the Font Burner blog. I think it is important that all our users are aware of issues like this. Thanks for your email and let me know if there is anything else I can do for you.
Adrian Hanft
I have yet to hear back from Keith, but when I do I will post it here.
While I do think your service is a very useful one, I’m not sure why you’d be surprised or taken aback by this.
Many “free” fonts are only free for certain uses, and the licenses (I’ve seen MANY) do NOT include republishing them or embedding them. In fact, many commercial fonts that you buy can’t be embedded in a document or have their curves (only rasterizations) used on the web.
As Joost van Rossum showed not too long ago, it’s reasonably elementary to pull the curves from sIFR, rebundle and make a new font. It was done at ATyp*I 2 years ago and I’m sure there are automated tools that make it easy for any hacker to do it today.
The fact is that some publishers are very restrictive in their licenses, whether or not you or I think it’s logical is another question entirely. When you download and use one of these fonts, you’re agreeing to a license, and if you violate it, expect to make the person whose intellectual property this is very unhappy.
January 25th, 2009 at 9:03 pmGreat article and very usefull tips!! Thanks so much. Hope it will continue.
you can get interesting post about web usability and technology on my Web Usability Blog.
February 22nd, 2009 at 9:20 am