[oliwarner]

Though I'll not make any judgement towards "prevent access", the main license file[0] does state:

> All fonts are the property of Schwartzco, Inc., t/a Commercial Type (https://commercialtype.com/), and may not be reproduced without permission.

As a side tangent, it constantly surprises me how deep the creative industries manage to sink their claws into IP and licensing. I don't understand how artistic commissions manage to hold onto ownership. If I told my a prospective client that the websites they'd be paying me to build would forever more be —essentially— mine, they'd fire me pretty quickly. Same goes for most work product with employers.

The Guardian commissioned these faces. Why would they accept such a crappy license?

[0]: https://github.com/guardian/frontend/blob/master/LICENSE

[matt4077]

A font family with the weights and other options a newspaper needs is a major undertaking. It's maybe 5 to 10 person-years of rather specialised work. For a publication constantly fighting to even break even, the costs aren't trivial.

So, the answer obviously is: the Guardian got the font far cheaper by allowing it to be sold to other customers, and (relevant here) not paying for a license that allows sub-licensing (which would be completely useless to them, anyway).

I wouldn't be surprised if it was actually a deal where no money changed hands, with the foundry getting the Guardian name for PR, and constant feedback during the design process.

As to web design: unless otherwise specified, web design is covered by the same copyright rules as fonts (or movies, or books,...). The correct analogy actually is a customer selling your design to some third party, something that probably would upset quite a few designers.

As for the customer changing a design: that's an infringement of the creator's so-called "moral rights". Its legality varies between jurisdictions, I believe.

[notavalleyman]

> A font family with the weights and other options a newspaper needs is a major undertaking. It's maybe 5 to 10 person-years of rather specialised work

I'd love to hear more about this and why it's such an undertaking. Is it the "Font family" aspect that takes so long, because the designers are expected to produce a never ending line of similar fonts and symbols? Do the font designers have to consider printing costs ("if we make that exclamation mark one degree thicker, it'll use fifteen incremental litres of black ink per year")?

[krsdcbl]

For the lettershapes themselves it won't likely be a matter of "printed area", depending on the news paper it will be printed at a far lower dot grain density than your average print product.

There are although numerous things to consider when designing a font for small printed copy, like how tight you can make a corner before ink would start to trap in it and bleed over the detail.

But there are many aspects of creating a full font family that make it a huge amount of work - not only do you need to fit all supported characters to different weights, essentially re-drawing the glyphs for every weight to make them balanced within their shape. You'll also have to do the kerning, tweaking individual spacings for all possible letter combinations at every weight. And that is all after having created & perfected every shape of every glyph to work together and have a distinguishable look and fashion.

[JorgeGT]

Being outside the business, I found it surprising as well! The fonts are named GuardianTextWeb, GuardianSansWeb, etc., suggesting to me they have been purposely commissioned by The Guardian to obtain a differentiated look and feel.

However the license is non-exclusive and revocable, and restrictive to the point that only web seems to be allowed. The fonts are indeed available for purchase: https://commercialtype.com/catalog/guardian which from the point of view of protecting the look and feel of your brand that you just commissioned seems a bit weird.

[laumars]

It really depends on what you're paying for. If I buy a piece of proprietary software I buy a licence to use it and I wouldn't expect to own the source code.

So the real question is are you paying for the developers / artists service (ie paying for their time) or are you buying the product itself? That's a discussion that has to happen between the customer and the company selling their services.

For what it's worth, I've used photographers and other creative services before where they only charged one flat fee and you retained copyright ownership on anything produced. I have also worked at web shops where the company retained ownership of the code, however in that instance we also did the hosting, support, etc so we provided the service. Essentially SaaS but before SaaS really took off as a buzzword.

[oliwarner]

If I was paying for a developer to write the software for me, I would expect to own the portions that were written as part of that comission.

It's not what can happen (you can contract all sorts of conditions), it's that retaining ownership seems to be the standard for comissioned creative work.

[aasasd]

The Guardian font seems to not be exclusive to Guardian: https://commercialtype.com/catalog/guardian

[JorgeGT]

I've found that for instance Berlingske in Denmark uses the Guardian font pack: https://www.b.dk/

[kaelig]

I used to work at the Guardian. My understanding is that the font was commissioned specifically for the Guardian, and they had exclusive usage rights for a few years only.