That's a standard practice for a lot of webfont vendors isn't it? I know it was for Typekit/Adobe Fonts (which requires a Creative Cloud subscription).

What even is Typekit’s pricing these days? I looked into it a few weeks ago and the only thing I could find was Typekit comes with any Creative Cloud subscription, including $10/mo ones. But surely you can’t pay $10/mo to serve an arbitrary amount from their webfont CDN? Did I miss something? Is the pricing only available after you subscribe?

Since the 2018 rebranding to Adobe Fonts, there are no pageview or font limits for subscribers: https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/plan-limits.html

Agency clients need their own subscription, legally: https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/font-licensing.html#web-...

There are no limits on pageviews https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/plan-limits.html

And it's actually cheaper... for $4.99/month you get an InCopy subscription which includes Adobe Fonts. That's the same price as Typekit was before Adobe bought it.

I have Typekit via Creative Cloud, use web fonts on my site, and have not run into any additional fees or restrictions. That said, my site is pretty low-traffic, so it's possible there's some issue I'd run into if I used it more.

As far as I know, that is the deal.

I'm sure it is standard practice. That still doesn't make commercial web font licenses more reasonable for anything except advertising and marketing campaigns.

It's also incredibly risky for advertising and marketing campaigns.

I had one client that started getting their product catalog scraped aggressively, and the invoice for their licensed font usage that month was an order of magnitude higher than they expected (low six figures, vs. low five figures).

They slapped the site behind an aggressively configured enterprise WAF[1] in response to that bill specifically. It made for an abrasive visitor experience, fundamentally broke server logging data (due to header mangling), and constantly broke third party integrations.

It was such a pain to service the client that I ended up convincing their network security team to let me pilot Cloudflare in front of the WAF (that they insisted remain). Ended up using a Worker function to tidy up after the janky WAF header mangling, got them to remove the explicit challenge page, and just swapped out the licensed font for a generic/free one for suspicious activity.

All because of that stupid pageview based font licensing model and its susceptibility to abuse.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_application_firewall

>I had one client that started getting their product catalog scraped aggressively, and the invoice for their licensed font usage that month was an order of magnitude higher than they expected (low six figures, vs. low five figures).

so, my corporate dirty tricks campaign company could offer to make your competitors advertising costs go through the roof if I find they've been using the wrong fonts?!?

> Ended up using a Worker function to tidy up after the janky WAF header mangling, got them to remove the explicit challenge page, and just swapped out the licensed font for a generic/free one for suspicious activity.

So if companies experience expensive font download attacks I can send them a reasonably priced offer for consulting services to fix this problem!?!

'but what about ethics'

grrrr, I hate that good angel.

I assume the parent comment meant non-Webfont applications, i.e. for static assets (print or raster/vector digital)

If one is going through those lengths to influence a page view counter, couldn’t one just report a different number?

What did the WAF even do?

In the case of the font foundry my client was licensing from,

‣ You were not allowed to self-host the font files, and had to load them directly from the hosting URL provided by the font foundry

‣ There was no explicit reporting involved. Every time the font resource was downloaded from their server, the foundry counted that as a licensed pageview.

‣ The foundry used cache control headers[1] on the response, so that every page load required contacting their origin server and could be logged for billing purposes.

‣ The foundry sent an invoice, telling you what your usage was. If your resource download/pageview count was within your contractual limit, you're invoiced your base rate. If your pageview count was above your contractual rate, you pay your base rate + whatever your overage cost was.

The WAF did a bunch of stuff, but the primary headache was that they enabled challenge pages[2] for every single visitor as a knee-jerk reaction, with a ridiculously low validity timeframe. So every user got hit with an interstitial Javascript challenge page on first pageload, and if they stuck around for just a bit they'd get hit with another one out of nowhere. And that "other one" could easily be on a background resource load rather than the primary page itself, which would just hang. And the way the interstitial page loaded the final content for traffic that "passed the test" obliterated referral information and made it impossible to make heads or tails of your traffic data.

The intent being that automated traffic wouldn't get past the WAF and would never load the actual destination page, and by extension the precious font files. But the way it operated had a lot of nasty side effects that caused a never-ending stream of technical problems, in addition to just being a terrible user experience.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ca...

[2] https://www.imperva.com/blog/how-incapsula-client-classifica...

...and all this pain, expense, complexity, and degraded UX, for the sake of _someone's preconceived ideas about the RELATIVE value to the brand of that particular font vs a generic font_. Yikes.

It's bullshit like this that cause people to get a local copy of the font, trace it, then release their new font as something with a different name and maybe a few minor changes that normal humans would never notice. Fonts are my least favorite thing, followed closely by printing.

Shouldn’t bother using custom fonts on web pages anyway, use the standard web fonts and save custom fonts for print or graphic designs.

I'm sure you're a big hit at all of the design meetings! How dare the devs tell the marketing/graphics people what they can and cannot do. Becareful, or they'll shove GA/AMP down at you in response!

- External fonts are blocked by security-conscious users (including every Tor Browser user who remembers to set the browser security level correctly) for a reason: they're a major attack vector

- External fonts are often purely cosmetic. Using what over time adds up to several megabytes of data for cosmetics is inconsiderate.

- inb4 "just disable remote fonts if you hate them": doing so breaks many websites that use icon fonts. Expecting users to have to manually configure 50+ websites (yes I did this, I count 54 websites on my exception list) is just insane.

- Many people need to use local fonts. Some dyslexic people actively choose a font that helps them read more easily. Asking someone to play the whack-a-mole game of "will disabling remote fonts break this site's icons or not" game on every site because of a disability just isn't right.

Just use sans, serif, and monospace for content. Let the user agent decide what that looks like, not your company's branding.

to be honest, why have corporate colours or logos either, or use photographs or artwork that causes extra bytes of data to be downloaded for mere cosmetic effect. i think corporate websites should consist of either the english word 'good' or the english word 'bad' based on whether the company is determined to be worthy, say by a committee headed by this dude, with an ASN.1 encoded block of data available for download for any ancilliary information required.

thank you for coming to my TED talk...

There is a big difference between shipping a 192px PNG/WebP image and shipping a custom font. Most of the criticisms I mentioned don't apply to something as small and safe as a logo.

Small PNGs with good alt text are not as unsafe, large, and brittle as third party fonts.

You're not responding to what I said; you're responding to a caricature of what you imagine me to be like. Doing so derails the discussion.

Cosmetics can be used, but they need a strict performance budget. I'd say that 50kb of render-blocking/CLS-inducing cosmetics and 250kb total cosmetics would be quite generous for 90% of corporate websites, though I'd rather see much lower sizes and reserve more space for content. I would not count inline images that convey information as part of an article's content in this budget.

I'm so glad there are people that are much more creative than you would have the world be, and I'm so glad there is push back on the creatives from just going nuts. However, I never want to live in a world where you're the winning voice in website design. So boring because of some electrons getting annoyed? Good text treatments lend itself to good graphic design. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean the rest of the world should suffer without it. I lived through web1.0, and I'm happy we can finally do things like have different fonts. If we could only get pages to flow just like in Illustrator or InDesign or Quark or whatever, that would be so much better. Instead, we have to live with sticty strict stricts like you fighting to keep things in blocks of boringness.

If you're worried about 3rd party fonts, then force the team to self-host the fonts. If the chosen fonts are not to the end user's liking, they can always override (if they are nerdy enough to know how). Just because lazy devs use 3rd party dosn't mean the baby has to be thrown out with the bath water.

1. Remote fonts, first or third party, are still a massive attack surface. This is why the Tor Browser's Torbutton disables them.

2. Non-default fonts for text still create a suboptimal experience for users with reading impairments like dyslexia who could benefit from using their preferred fonts in place of sans/serif without breaking pages that need icon fonts.

> Just because you don't like it doesn't mean the rest of the world should suffer without it.

By the same token, just because your design/marketing departments think a design "pops" doesn't mean that disadvantaged users should have to suffer by your personal preferences. People who need privacy (e.g tor users who disable js/JIT/SVG/any non-whitelisted fonts), extra a11y (changing default colors, fonts, layouts), and extra bandwidth constraints (satellite internet with high packet loss) exist too, and excessive web design frequently gets these people shafted.

I'm not saying that the world needs to change for my personal preferences; I'm saying that the world needs to cater less to personal preferences and more towards people's needs. People who make up a disadvantaged minority of users need disproportionate levels of accommodation, and their needs are more important than graphic design.

but, you can do both, right? that's what alternative text titles and descriptions of images are for, and the font is used to render test that has already been downloaded as utf-8/ascii/whatever characters making up the content of the html tags in the document. lynx exists. screen readers for the blind exist. that's no reason to try and downgrade the aesthetic experience for everyone else. i mean, i remember usenet and gopher, the web and html are just better, prettier, nicer to look at - a well laid out and designed page of content makes me happy, assuming the content is something i'm interested in, but even that isn't nescessary sometimes. and sure, i'm sad for vision impaired people who can't experience that, and sites that don't provide accessible versions of their content are bad and wrong, of course - but that doesn't mean i need to dilute my own experience to match. it'd be like banning people from going hill-walking because wheelchair users can't participate. the correct response it to try and work out how to include and enable access foir the wheelchair users without destroying the experience for everyone else - put in a cable car or something, i don't know. so yeah, i agree with your sentiments in the last two paragraphs above, i just think there's a better way to solve that problem - upgrade everyone's experience.

It's like talking to a mathmetician. You just can't.

Fonts adversely affect page load speeds for no good reason, most users don’t even notice or care about these custom fonts. It’s far better for the bottom line to have a fast page.

So they can bitch all they want, but at the end of the day, code is king. So bend the knee.

> So they can bitch all they want, but at the end of the day, code is king. So bend the knee.

lol what...

That's ridiculous..

So I need to develop a view counter for my static website? Not sure how to do that. Why do I need to pay for search engines crawling my website?

I think you link the webfont as an external resource on their site. I'm just speculating, however.

This is exactly how it works. You can't host the fonts locally.

Typefaces should not be copyrightable. Print ones are not, it makes no sense that digital ones are.

In the US, "typefaces", ie. the shapes of the letters, generally are not. "Fonts", ie. the programs that draw the letters, are copyrighted as software, as something of a workaround. For more reading on the history here Typographica has a succinct overview[0].

[0] https://typographica.org/on-typography/copyright-protection-...

Silly question, so how do type foundries prevent someone from literally copying the TTF, WOFF, EOT files - and then rebrand a font as their own?

Will the bits/bytes of a TTF be different if two people produced identically the exact same shape of the letters?

EDIT: let me clarify a bit. The GP said that the shape of the letters is not copyrighted in the US. Which implies to me that if Helvetica has the exact shape of the letter "s" to be like so, and if I were to manually trace the exact same shape (curves, width, height of the letter, etc) that I can do that and resell it (or open source it)

What I'm asking is, what prevents someone from skipping the step all together of tracing every letter in the Helvetica alphabet and instead, just digitally copies the TTF font file?

Would the TTF font file I create from a manual tracing of the Helvetica alphabet be different than if I simply digitally copied the official Helvetica TTF file?

If you trace each letter of a font to create a new font, you are creating a new font "program", even if your new "program" is very similar to what you would get from just copying the file. The traced font would have a different colour than the copied font. (https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23)

Users agree to a EULA which stipulates how they can and can't use the font. This contract provides the legal basis on which a foundry would pursue someone for suspected misuse. Here's Monotype's EULA for Helvetica Now[0], Section 9 specifically addresses copies and derivative works. From there, it becomes a legal matter.

[0] https://www.fonts.com/font/monotype/helvetica-now/licenses#

But how can you differentiate a Helvetica created font file from a font file where I manually traced every Helvetica alphabet identically.

Font cloning is a thing.

Font tracing is usually done by printing out the character to be traced at very large scale -- I've seen about 12" x 12" -- and placing it directly on a large digitizing tablet. A sequence of strokes / points is collected for the outline of the character, and then curves of somewhat reduced degree are fit to those strokes / points to both reduce font data size and reduce the impact of errors, inaccuracies, and quantization in the data capture.

Even at this huge scale, and with this amount of effort, the outline of your character will be very close to -- visually identical to! -- the starting character, but not exact. As a result, the generated font program will be quite different. For example, it may use a different number of control points for equivalent curves.

Now, one can imagine automating this process differently: Take a font file, digitally render each character, perturb it a small amount, and resynthesize the strokes to generate a new, different program for a visually identical font. This is generally against the terms of service for the initial font, however, which would make it a legal matter...

> This is generally against the terms of service for the initial font, however, which would make it a legal matter...

I doubt there's anything in the ToS for most fonts prohibiting me from rendering a short story that just so happens to contain every character and post it online for everyone to enjoy. I couldn't possibly predict that my friend who doesn't even know the name of the font, let alone ever agreed to any ToS, would take that render and trace all the characters on it.

Note that I generically said "render", not image or raster, since from my understanding, an SVG or vector PDF render of the font (not embedded, but turned into paths) wouldn't be any more copyrightable than a raster, but far easier to clone.

A font isn't just the letterforms, there's also all the metrics, spacing, kerning, and OpenType features like ligature replacement. Also modern OpenType releases contain many languages which makes the metrics even more complex. Metrics are also very refined to the point that with some fonts if they weren't copied completely there would be problems.

I suppose if you manually traced Helvetica letters, then they might have a case for misusing their font. After all, there isn't a licensing option that allows you to use the font as a template.

But what if the tracing was done by a consumer who visited a website containing the Helvetica™ font?

IANAL, but in the past I've heard the term "impliedd license" applied to things like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_license

I'd assume the license for viewing the file is implied, but I have no clue if it would hold up in court if you viewed the file -> traced the output (which is copying the typeface, not the font.)

If you copied the .ttf file and sold it, it's a copyright violation just like any software copying. The foundry takes you to court.

If you copy by hand (at what size? at what accuracy? do you include the same hinting and ligatures?) the file will not be bit-for-bit identical. The foundry cannot sue.

The same way any company prevents you from copying any computer program and rebranding it as your own. Lawyers. Vector fonts count as computer programs.

> What I'm asking is, what prevents someone from skipping the step all together of tracing every letter in the Helvetica alphabet and instead, just digitally copies the TTF font file?

What stops you from copying any copyright-protected software? Technically, usually, very little (sometimes DRM). But, mostly, its social/economic constraints like your (or your business’) particular tolerance for legal exposure.

Licenses are generally sold to medium sized to large companies who would not risk legal action pursuing what you suggest. There is money to spread around anyway. Fonts and branding are nothing compared to the upkeep for C-level execs.

Point stands. These ought to not be royalty driven.

I'm not sure I follow. Whether or not the typeface is eligible for copyright, the pricing model and terms of use are at the discretion of the font creator.

"How a font is sold is up to the discretion of the font creator" and "a font should not be sold on a sliding cost scale" aren't mutually exclusive -- the latter's pretty clearly asserting an opinion about reasonable pricing models and terms of use. There are a lot of things people do that they're perfectly within their rights to do that someone else might strongly believe they shouldn't, right?

Personally, I don't like the idea of selling fonts with costs governed by web page impressions, either, no matter how common it may be in the industry. I genuinely like having what I consider to be nice typefaces for my web sites, but this kind of licensing makes it incredibly impractical for me to use most commercial options.

Of course, but the "point" in question is whether a typeface (or font) should be copyrightable.

That type designs are not protected is a gross injustice. The time and effort involved in creating a type design is significant. Alas, when the type industry had the resources to lobby to have copyright law changed, they were making a lot of money from stealing each others' designs and chose to lobby the opposite. There was an ill-fated effort in the 90s to lobby for typeface design protection (I was part of it as the editor of a typography magazine) but it never achieved any measurable success.

It's not worth the hell that would ensue with people suing each other because their letters look too similar. Letters have to look similar -- that's the whole damn point!

That art styles are not protected is a gross injustice. The time and effort involved in creating an art style is significant. Alas, when the art industry had the resources to lobby to have copyright law changed…

Type designs not being protected by copyright has benefits, too. Afaik, they're still protected by patent. (Not everything has to be copyright law! That's something the “intellectual property” lobby seems to be wilfully ignoring.)

A design patent is available, but the bar for a design patent is very high and the income for most type designs is enough to maybe buy a nice dinner for two.¹ Copyright registration is easy and cheap.³

People who argue against type design copyright fall into at least one of three camps: (a) they have no idea what it takes to make a good typeface, (b) their ability to distinguish typefaces doesn't go much farther than distinguishing sans/serif/monospace (if even that), and/or (c) they hope to be able to use other people's designs for their own benefit.

1. Retail sales of typefaces is a ridiculously unprofitable business, which is part of why every nearly independent foundry/type reseller of measurable size is ending up under the umbrella of Monotype Imaging. The handful of designers who have made a living from type design either are employed as staff designers for Adobe/Microsoft/Monotype, do high-value custom designs for publishing clients (although these are becoming increasingly scarce as publishers who still do print are less willing to spend money on quality²) or, the big one but probably gone for good now, embedded fonts in printers (Arthur Baker's deal with HP, he claimed, left him set for life financially).

2. A big part of Font Bureau's early capital came from producing a custom version of Palatino for the gravure pages of Playboy that would match the printed output on the offset pages. There's probably a whole book to be written about the ways in which Hugh Hefner spent Playboy money in ways that nominally benefited the magazine but had a bigger impact in providing cash to artistic endeavors (most notably writers) that wouldn't otherwise see much money.

3. And optional. If registration occurs after an infringement, the copyright holder can only sue for actual damages. Pre-infringement registration also entitles the copyright holder to sue for punitive damages.

The digital one is considered as code. In some countries even the print one has copyright.

From: https://glarts.org/font-and-typeface-legal-tip-sheet/

> In the United States, fonts are protectable under copyright law. Typefaces, however, are not. ... A trademark protects what a typeface is called, a copyright protects how a font program is written, and a design patent protects letter design—how the letters appear.

So if I understand this correctly, then unless they have a design patent for the entire range of typefaces, you could use some of the typefaces if you use a different encoding. Perhaps someone with legal background can comment.

> Fonts should not be copyrightable. Print fonts are not, it makes no sense that digital ones are.

I agree with your first statement, except that I'm stuck re-wording it to "I wish fonts weren't copyrightable" because I can't find an argument/proper analogy that works.

I don't know the details around copyright law, IANAL (surprise!) either, so I'm looking at this from an incredibly naive legal perspective -- that almost everything is copyrightable (in the United States) except for facts. Since copyright law predates digital fonts, you have to look at things they are most like to see what applies (and find a judge to agree, but that part seems to be the simple). Print fonts are not copyrightable. I'm not sure why they're not copyrightable -- were they explicitly excluded (i.e. there's a law on the books that says "Print fonts are not copyrightable"[0]) or were they found to be "like this other thing that is excluded, so they are excluded, too".

Then, looking at what's similar about print fonts versus digital ones, there's not really a whole lot other than that they're "concepts" that represent letters in this context. One is chiseled out of some form of metal or strong material, is that size/shape permanently and though there's science/research behind it, for whatever reason, it didn't represent enough of a kind of work to warrant protection. A font has a lot in common on the surface, but underneath it's a program[1]. One could extend that to say "bitmap fonts are so similar to print fonts that they should be excluded" but one cannot say the same for TTF/others and I'd imagine.

The bigger problem, though, is that exclusions to copyright are basically never made any longer. This used to be more common, but the entertainment industry's money/power continues to extend copyright in ways that benefit them to the exclusion of other industries -- particularly software -- the large players have a lot of money, so a law that was designed to equally protect invention/creation (really, patent law was by-and-large aimed at helping individual inventors protect their invention/give them a chance to capitalize it against abusive larger competition) ends up helping secure the existing players positions.

Now, I don't know if anyone wants Warner Brothers to make Mickey Mouse cartoons, but I suspect there's a less heavy-handed approach to protecting long-held IP while not extending copyright, basically, indefinitely for everything.

So yeah, all of that to say "No, I don't think fonts should be copyrightable, either ... but I can say that for so many things and there's so much wrong with Copyright these days that it warrants revisiting a reset/rethink." Maybe one day!

[0] It won't be that sentence, it'll be a page worth of explaining why it doesn't fall into the various defined kinds of works.

[1] TTF hinting is turing complete.

To answer your specific question as to why fonts are not copyrightable in the US, 37 C.F.R. § 202.1(e) specifies that a "typeface as typeface" is not copyrightable.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/37/202.1

Print fonts are copyrightable.

In the United States, the shapes of typefaces are not eligible for copyright.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...

But in France and Germany but not Austria despite the Vienna Agreement for the Protection of Type Faces and their International Deposit.

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/dfat/seldoc/1973/2203.htm...

Ah, so that's how knock-off fonts work. You can reproduce essentially the same output (the typeface) as long as the code that produces it is distinct (the font).