[FC-discuss] Font used on Homepage

[Fred Benenson]

Again, no money is being charged for the FC.o logo which seems to be the
only thing using the font in question, but I don't think this is material.
Also, the t-shirt's writing was hand drawn and so were the logos, no fonts
were used (or harmed) while making them.

It seems to me that commercial distribution of the font is really the
objectionable action in this case -- commercial use of an image with text
rendered in said font is not illegal. This has the awkward implication that
even if one illegally obtains a font one can still use it to create legal
images. Fonts in and of themselves are not protected by US copyright law;
despite their files being protected as computer programs.

I'm not a lawyer, but my feeling is that the only precedent that would help
the p22 owners would be Adobe winning a suit against a software company
distributing 1k+ fonts on CDROM:

http://www.typeright.org/suit_02.html

This would indicate that it is not so much distribution nor commercial usage
but commercial distribution (since you are distributing a font program which
is subject to copyright) that is actionable.

So if the owners of p22 are OK with us non-commercially distributing the
font (that is, not charging for its distribution) it seems as if they can't
object even if the distribution resulted in someone using the font
commercially.

Shades of gray, but I think its important to try to understand the law here
because it can be quite counter-intuitive.

Anyway, I agree with Rob that it might be better just to give them the
scenario and ask if they consider it commercial, which I doubt they will --
IMHO its a stretch to argue that there is commercial usage of the font going
on simply because t-shirts are being sold on the site that happens to use
the font in its logo.

F
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