> if the font distributor shows the buyer some text and requires them to click "I Agree" before downloading the font, then they have a valid contract
Right. But if they don't agree, then no legal mechanism exists to keep the "customer" from getting those shapes from someone who doesn't impose a contract, since anyone can peddle the same letterforms without violating copyright.
Sure, if you clone the font. But if you clone the font you can also distribute the clone as a web font. What's the difference?
Even without. Many use cases in print and other traditional, non-Web media exist where a clone wouldn't be required, because the end result is "flat", and you're not dealing in live text objects, unlike on the Web. You're shooting a fixed target. For example, it doesn't matter whether you reproduce a font's "fi" and "ff" ligatures if the blurb or logotype you're working on doesn't have those sequences. Worst case scenario, a person can get by with brute force—tracing the letterforms that they need. It's not as the operations to do that is any different from the kinds of edits they're already doing, anyway.
That's not true. Distributing letterforms wouldn't be a copyright violation. But if the font distributor shows the buyer some text and requires them to click "I Agree" before downloading the font, then they have a valid contract, which can impose whatever obligations they want, including usage restrictions.
Note that copyright licenses may not always be contracts, in cases where the recipient doesn't explicitly agree to them. Notably, the GPL is designed to work without needing agreement. From the GPLv2's text:
> You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works.
Though, the GPL has been enforced in the US as a contract anyway. [1]
But license agreements which you have to explicitly agree to are unquestionably contracts and enforceable as such.
Contracts are somewhat more difficult to enforce than copyright. You can usually only recover actual damages rather than statutory or punitive damages, and you can't use the DMCA as a shortcut to enforcement before going to court. But that's far from saying they're not enforceable at all.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2017/05/13/gnu_gpl_enforceable_c...