on 22 July 2009From today’s edition of the Linotype newsletter:
Until recently, it was difficult for web developers to work with any fonts outside of the few common “web safe” selections.
Until recently?
At Linotype.com, you can now download Linotype, ITC, and Monotype fonts with a license that allows embedding in all mumble-mumble-mumble websites.
Oh, that’s nice. Wait, what was that bit there where you mumbled?
all non-commercial websites.
Right… So, if licensing was the reason we weren’t using more fonts online, which it wasn’t, we can all forget our worries as long as our websites are ‘non-commercial’. Is a company home page that doesn’t actually sell anything non-commercial? What about a big-budget site created by a major agency for a charity? How about public sector? Revenue-generating but not-for-profit? A personal website with Google Ads on it? Could there be any medium or any time in the history of human industry in which trying to draw a distinction between what is and isn’t commercial would create more hassle?
For embedding in commercial websites, please contact our sales team, who are waiting to discuss the best possible licensing extentions for your needs
Look, we know you’re German, but make an effort – if you’re writing US English you can have ‘license’ but not ‘licensing’, or if it’s British English vice versa; and nobody spells ‘extension’ like that.
And back on the point of this post: if font licensing people had their heads up their in the sand in the mid-1990s, as I suggested when I debated the issue back then with font vendors and copyright enforcers, you’re merely demonstrating that they’re still stuck there. What in the entire stupid history of copyright stupidity could possibly have led you to speculate that someone would contemplate buying an extra licence to use a font in published content? That’s the one single thing that a standard font licence already offers.
Magazine publishers don’t buy a font, install it on their art director’s Mac, watch her lay out an issue in it, then ring up the foundry and discuss how many copies of the mag they’re going to be printing so that they can pay the appropriate fee. They’ve already bought the font! Of course they’re going to bloody use it! Why would the rules be any different for online?
Dummköpfe.
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