[rangibaby]

Font licensing is rent-seeking bullshit on the level of "Mickey Mouse" copyright extensions and I'm surprised the big foundries have managed to convince everyone that they need to pay for typefaces, which are explicitly copyright-free in every major jurisdiction.

[fsloth]

Mickey Mouse is just a character. Font faces can be considered critical technical components in the printing process.

If you are using a typeface to print a metric ton of publications, I'm pretty sure you would want it to be engineered to be fit for that purpose. And that the typeface definitions retains its' quality. I would not trust an open source process to maintain a standard of quality. Hence, you need an institution to maintain the quality. Which needs funding.

What is the "correct" price for the font foundries services is of course a different matter altogether.

[antidesitter]

> I would not trust an open source process to maintain a standard of quality.

On what basis?

[fsloth]

On a hunch. I may be wrong.

It seems to me that a font, suitable for printing, is a niche product with a very old history of proprietary providers and craftsmen.

It's this crafts aspect which makes the open sourcing a bit more difficult, IMO. I.e you need specialists to maintain a certain quality.

[pbhjpbhj]

And only rent-seeking craftsmen are capable of high quality work?

[fsloth]

The question is not quality, but predictability.

Mickey Mouse is not a very good analog to a typeface. The analog to Mickey Mouse would be a letter in an alphabet - an abstract concept, that, never the less, is immediately recognizable.

A typeface, then, is a specific set of instructions to a specific implementation of this abstract idea. I.e. with Mickey it might be a specification to a specific implementation of this character including the type of voice actor to use, how the character behaves specifically, how it moves, etc etc. I.e. a much more specific than just "It's mickey, it's ours, fuck off" type of obstruction of creativity.

Like I said, I have no idea if foundries and their license fees are necessary, but at least their clients know how to source a specific high quality implementation of their typefaces.

[antidesitter]

A font doesn’t require continuous maintenance.

[jrockway]

I mean... sort of. It seems like hundreds of new emoji are added every few years. They do not draw themselves.

Question is whether or not anyone cares.

[bovermyer]

Just out of curiosity, how would you suggest that foundries make money?

[asaph]

I believe GP is implying that they don't deserve to make money from a copyright-free asset.

[tptacek]

Tech support.

[antidesitter]

Perhaps the GP is suggesting that they aren’t owed money.

[pbhjpbhj]

>which are explicitly copyright-free in every major jurisdiction //

Not sure what classes as major jurisdictions for you but I thought that lack of protection for typefaces was a peculiarity of USA-ian copyright?

Certainly it appears in the UK that there is typeface protection [CDPA S.55 limits it to <26 years though] and that you can't trace to work around it?

[rangibaby]

AFAIK typefaces are free according to Japanese law as well.

Re: UK

- Helvetica (to choose one) is over 50 years old

- It is not copyright infringement in the UK to use a font

[amyjess]

What I find to be rent-seeking bullshit is when licenses impose higher fees on using fonts in PDFs over static images.

Why? Because a pirate can theoretically extract the TTF/OTF from a PDF, so the licensor needs to be paid extra money to compensate for the piracy that PDF usage will bring.

This is such a bullshit 20th-century excuse. It's 2018. Any pirate worth their salt can find any foundry's complete collection on a number of torrent sites. Or for that matter, they can just Google the name of any font and one of the top Google results will be a website illegally offering the font as a free direct download. They don't need to extract a file from a PDF to get their hands on it. There are more efficient ways.