Font licensing, and the three terms that cause every problem

The file is licensed, not bought

A typeface is a drawing; a font is the software that renders it. What changes hands is permission to use that software in defined ways, and the definitions are the whole substance of the agreement. This is why two files that look identical on screen can carry completely different rights, and why the download page is never the authority: the licence file distributed inside the archive is.

Where a foundry's website and the licence file shipped with the font disagree, the file governs. It is the copy that travelled with the software, and it is the copy that would be read in a dispute.

The Open Font Licence, and its one real condition

The SIL Open Font Licence is the licence under which most genuinely free professional typefaces are released. It permits use, study, modification and redistribution, including in commercial work, with no fee and no attribution requirement in the finished design.

It carries two conditions that matter. A modified version may not be sold on its own; it may only be distributed under the same licence, bundled with other software. And a font may declare a Reserved Font Name, in which case a modified version must be renamed. That second condition is the one that gets broken, usually by someone subsetting a family for a website and keeping the original name in the file metadata.

Subsetting itself is explicitly permitted. This site serves nine display faces cut down to just the handful of glyphs each one actually sets, which is a modification the licence anticipates and allows.

Free for personal use is not free

This is the term that catches designers, and it is the term most common on free catalogue sites. A face released free for personal use may be installed, opened and used for anything nobody pays for. The moment it appears in work a client has commissioned, in a logo, on packaging, or in anything sold, the use falls outside the grant.

Two details make it worse than it sounds. First, the restriction usually applies to the designer's commercial context, not to the visible outcome, so an unpaid-looking piece of work done inside a paid engagement is still commercial use. Second, these licences are frequently silent on embedding in a website or an application, and silence is not permission.

The correct response is not to avoid these faces. It is to read the terms, and where a face is wanted commercially, to buy the commercial licence the same foundry almost always offers alongside it. The display catalogue on this site links to terms rather than to files for exactly this reason.

Commercial families sell rights by medium

A commercial foundry typically sells at least three separate things, and buying one does not confer the others.

• A desktop licence covers installing the font on a stated number of machines and using it to make static artwork: print, images, PDFs where the font is embedded for viewing.
• A web licence covers serving the font file to a browser, and is usually priced by monthly page views. Taking a desktop file and putting it in a stylesheet is by a wide margin the commonest commercial breach, and it is detectable from outside by anyone who opens the network tab.
• An application licence covers embedding the font inside software, a game or a device, where it is distributed as part of a product.

Ebook, broadcast and logo-usage rights are frequently sold separately again. None of this is unreasonable, it is the same structure as stock photography, but it does mean the question is never "do we have the font", it is "which grant do we hold, and does this use fall inside it".

Who holds the licence when three parties touch the file

A client commissions an agency, the agency designs with a licensed face, and a printer needs the file to output the job. Under most commercial terms, the agency's licence covers the agency's machines. The printer needs either their own licence or a permitted transfer, and the client needs their own if they will ever set anything themselves.

The practical protection is to record, at the point the face is chosen, which entity bought which grant and how many seats it covers. Doing that costs ten minutes at the start of a project and settles an argument that otherwise surfaces two years later when nobody remembers.

Fonts already installed on the machine

System fonts arrive with an operating system licence that generally permits making artwork but not redistributing the file. That distinction is why a face installed with an office suite cannot simply be uploaded to a web server, and why the pairing bench on this site describes the installed faces it offers as rendering from the reader's own machine rather than serving them.

A short checklist before a face is used

• Open the licence file inside the download, not the web page that offered it.
• Establish whether the grant covers commercial work at all.
• Establish which media it covers: desktop, web, application, and anything else the project needs.
• Check for a reserved font name before subsetting or renaming anything.
• Record who bought what, and how many seats.

Five lines, once per face. It is the cheapest insurance in the whole font selection process.