Font Licensing For The Web

Unless you\’re a copyright or digital media licensing pro., this stuff can be confusing. Custom fonts are increasingly being used on the web via several methods. Each method may require specific licensing to cover your intended use and often times font licenses simply don\’t specify restrictions associated with these new technologies.

Click here to see full post: http://blog.themeforest.net/general/font-licensing-for-the-web/

The laws where you live may not apply to the places you intend on using copyrighted files. For example, if you upload a website template to Theme Forest and the font license doesn’t state that you can use the font with @font-face, we won’t accept it.

If you use a font in your own website in a way not specified in the font license, then that is between you and the font author. If the font author decides to press charges for copyright infringement or something then the font license won’t protect you and it will be up to the courts to decide.

Yes, your country may have laws allowing you to do that, but your web server might be located in a country with different laws. Or perhaps the web hosting company has an agreement or policy you accepted when you signed up that it would violate. Either way, you’re putting yourself at a greater risk by not clarifying what you can or cannot do with someone else’s work.

The statement I made was meant as a recommendation to protect yourself and as a “rule” of sorts for Envato submissions. If you want to submit a file to an Envato marketplace, make sure you have explicit permission to use all the file assets or we might not accept it.

I hope this helps! Also, thanks for reading the post.

Ok, legal aspects can be a pain… but I’m not sure if the following is right:

If the license doesn’t specify restrictions for your intended use, assume the license does not permit it and get explicit permission directly from the author first.

I don’t know much about your country’s legislation, but here in Argentina our Constitution say’s that everything that is not prohibited by law is legal. And the same applies for contracts and licenses. So you don’t have to assume restrictions the font’s license doesn’t specify.

Again, I don’t know your legislation and the jurisprudence of your country, so I’d like to know really why you said that.

The rest of the post is very interesting, I haven’t heard about the EOT technology. I have to try @font-face one of these days…

That is absolutely false dude, I’m from Venezuela and we have that article in our Civil Code, but that only apply in our country. With that said, you can’t sell / redistribute anything without permission and that applies in the whole world! cheers – y saludos contáctame y podemos hablar un poco más de eso.

What I wanted to say is that your generalization (“assume the license does not permit it “) isn’t always true, you have to take a look at each case. I know you intended it to be as a recommendation, and it would be the best rule to apply if you don’t want to have any legal problems. But you know, a lot of people who will read this don’t have any knowledge about the law (as a discipline) so I believe it would be better not to make this kind of generalizations because they can confuse or lead to misunderstandings.

If a lot of the people that read this article don’t have any knowledge about the law then it’s better to assume that they cannot use the item in question as they intend to without first obtaining permission.

The idea is that if people aren’t sure, it’s better to be safe and not use the item in question until they contact the author and obtain permission or clarification on the requested usage and restrictions. This isn’t to say however, that the license itself doesn’t actually permit the intended usage.

I’m not sure how the legal world works where you live but in America people will sue you for anything and everything, even if you’re supposed to be protected by a contract or license. Sometimes the licenses for digital media are not written correctly which can lead to misunderstanding permitted uses and in some cases people get in trouble for it even though they aren’t truly at fault. My motto is, “Better safe than sorry” especially when it comes to potential legal trouble.