Licenses for Fonts.. How many really pay for them?

G

georgeuk

New Member
How many of you pay for licenses to use fonts ? Thus far, I have been. Sometimes I wonder though how anyone can tell.
 
 
There are also plenty of free fonts for personal and/or commercial use, so there is no excuse for not paying for a font license when required.
 
I do pay for fonts, or else acquire legally free ones. I'm firmly of the belief that creatives should be paid for their work.

I do sometimes have mixed feelings on the big foundries though. A full set of weights of Garamond from Monotype runs into the hundreds but since Claude Garamond died in 1561, I'm pretty sure he doesn't get a royalty. Likewise William Caslon, Giambattista Bodoni, John Baskerville et al. who are all long dead, but whose work is still very widely monetised.
 
hankscorpio said:
Because they sold their fonts to other companies who now have the rights to it.
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Actually they all made physical type to use in their own presses, which was sold on to other people after they passed away. It's only been possible to copyright typefaces in the UK since 1916 & it still isn't in the US, but even if modern copyright law had applied when they were all working the standard term of life + 70 years would have expired by now for all of the designers I mentioned.

What Monotype, Linotype & Adobe do undoubtedly own is the rights to their own digitisation of the pre-existing typefaces & I'm not arguing they shouldn't, just saying that I sometimes have mixed feelings about how vigorously they defend work that wasn't originally theirs.

Of course, if I did have the skills there would be nothing to stop me getting hold an example of one of Caslon's original specimen sheets and making my own digital font based on it. But I don't have the skills, which is a big tick in the 'pay the font designers' column.
 
If I use a specific font that isn't free, then it's paid for and usually that charge is passed on to the client in full or a percentage of it depending on the type of font and the license applied to it.
 
PistolPete said:
Actually they all made physical type to use in their own presses, which was sold on to other people after they passed away. It's only been possible to copyright typefaces in the UK since 1916 & it still isn't in the US, but even if modern copyright law had applied when they were all working the standard term of life + 70 years would have expired by now for all of the designers I mentioned.

What Monotype, Linotype & Adobe do undoubtedly own is the rights to their own digitisation of the pre-existing typefaces & I'm not arguing they shouldn't, just saying that I sometimes have mixed feelings about how vigorously they defend work that wasn't originally theirs.

Of course, if I did have the skills there would be nothing to stop me getting hold an example of one of Caslon's original specimen sheets and making my own digital font based on it. But I don't have the skills, which is a big tick in the 'pay the font designers' column.
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Yeh I know how type was created - thanks.

If there's no copyright on something, and a company creates the digital version of it, then they own the copyright, regardless of who created it.
 
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