Common Sense Comes to Font Licensing—At Last
It's not often that end user license agreements are changed to more accurately reflect the real-world practices of users, but that's exactly what FontShip International recently did. The new license for use of its FontFonts fonts (say that fast three times) permits sending them along with the related document to a service bureau for output. Be still, my beating heart!
But wait, there's more. You can now move fonts onto your laptop, so you can continue to work on a document while mobile or at home. Is there no end to this largesse? You can also make a protected PDF file that contains embedded fonts available for viewing or downloading on a Web site. Now life is once more worth living!
Most of you are probably shaking your heads, since you were already sending fonts to service bureaus and moving your work back and forth between your production system and a laptop, along with the fonts. Perhaps you were even embedding fonts in PDF files and placing them on Web sites (to the horror of most of us, who dread encountering PDFs online).
True, FontShop is simply acknowledging the existence of known customer behaviour in the new license. But by doing so it makes all of its customers honest again—at least, in the domain of font usage. And that can only be a good thing. Here's hoping the other major font vendors follow their lead.
Chris Dickman
Editor, Graphics.com
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