< Fonts
Intellectual property laws concerning fonts vary greatly from country to country. In some countries font data is copyrightable but font designs aren't. In other countries font designs are copyrightable, but font data not. The following attempts to briefly summarize the situation for the use of people interested in getting fonts included into Fedora.
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer. Nothing below should be taken as a legal opinion. Opinions vary wildly as to what forms of IP protection apply to fonts. Opinions vary even more wildly as to what forms of IP protection should apply to fonts.
Various forms of protection exist for fonts exist:
- Font names can be trademarked throughout most of the world. While a few names, such as "Courier" are in the public domain, most of the familiar font names such as "Arial" or "Helvetica" are the trademarks of one company or another.
- The computerized data making up the font is subject to copyright in the United States and some other countries. This protection continues through automated conversion to a different format.
(The design of text fonts itself is not subject to copyright in the US. In the US, if the design of a font is not otherwise protected, it's legal to print out a large image of the font then retrace it. However, proving that the new outlines were not generated from the computerized original data may be difficult.)
- Type designs themselves have protections in some countries. In the UK, font designs have been subject to copyright since 1989. France and Germany are other countries with protection for typeface designs.
- In the US "design patents" can be granted for fonts, though this is relatively rare. (About 150 design patents for fonts have been granted in total by the USPTO.) A design patent lasts 14 years from date of grant. Originality of the design is required.
- Font designs can be protected by "design registration" in some countries. The terms of this vary between countries. In the UK, for example, a design registration can be extended in 5 year increments up to 25 years.
Along with legal issues, there are also ethical issues. A new type design with genuine innovation is a major creative work. Even if is legal to create an exact curve-by-curve clone of Palatino or Comic Sans, is it really appropriate to do so? Lettering has been done for thousands of years, printing for hundreds of years. If you don't have the skill to come with a new type design on your own, that's no reason to rip off last year's hot font. Find a nice font in an old book and copy that.
Because Fedora is an international project, fonts distributed with Fedora need to respect a wider set of legal protections than those of any one country. The following is a set of rough guidelines:
- The name of the font should either be unique or be generic.
- The data of a font must be original. It is never appropriate to start with data from a proprietary font and incoporate it into your own font, no matter what conversion process is in-between.
An obvious exception to this is if the license of the original allows modifications. For example, the URW fonts included with Fedora are licensed under the GPL and data from them can be used in other GPL fonts.
If you copy data from another font, you must also include the original copyright notice and license in your font.
- The design of the font shouldn't be an exact copy of any existing font, unless the font is clearly out of copyright protection throughout the world. The exact rules on copyright terms highly complex; a font where the original designer died more than 70 years ago should be OK.
A design that strongly resembles an existing font, but isn't an exact copy is a gray area. If there are clear differences throughout the font, not just in a few characters; if you can find other fonts that the new font strongly resembles, then it is probably OK. A strong resemblence to a design more than 25-30 years old is less of a problem than a strong resemblence to a newer font.
-- OwenTaylor