Legality of using Fonts

[Terry Hancock]

On 10 Feb 2006 09:08:28 -0800
"Kamilche" <klachemin at comcast.net> wrote:
> Let's say I own a font, and use it in a paint program to
> 'draw some text' on a picture that I slap up on the
> Internet. Everything's probably fine, right? But what if I
> draw some text on a bitmap on the hard drive, add drop
> shadows and decorations, and use it to 'blit' text in a
> game? The answer is less obvious to me then.

In fact, the answer depends on what country you are in.

In the United States, the actual visual images of the
characters in a font are not copyrightable material. You can
do anything you like with them.

TrueType, however, adds an extra wrinkle, because a TT font
is actually a *program* to create those images.  However,
you can escape this entirely if the only thing you use is
the *rendering* of the characters.  You could, for example,
create an entire *bitmap* font at a given font size, by
cutting and pasting output from a TT font.

Using the *name* of the font may be a bit stickier, because
it may well be trademarked (i.e. if you generated your
bitmap font from the FooBar(TM) TTF, you may not be able to
call your font FooBar, though you may get away with calling
it TooBar, or some such thing.  Certain fonts that have wide
use in the free-software community, such as the "Lucida"
series have had this problem.

So far, this is all good news for you.  But in fact, fonts
can be copyrightable under the laws of some nations, so you
could get into a sticky area just because of that.

I think that even in that case, though, you'd be okay with
just about any font you have a legal right to use.

So, I personally consider that reason enough to prefer free
fonts, and there are quite a few of them available. Many of
them are quite nice.  Unfortunately, of course, there is
*not* as much selection as would be nice, and it would be a
great thing if more free-licensed typography was available.
But it is, of course, hard and exacting work that not many
people know how to do well.

Finding truly free-licensed fonts can be a bit difficult
because there are so-many "sort of" free fonts that it
clutters the field.  Several good fonts are included in the
Debian Linux distribution, though, and of course, they had
to get debian-legal's stamp of approval to get there, so
they are indeed free.  Otherwise, you have to look harder,
and read carefully.

Cheers,
Terry

 -- 
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com