 So am I not on mute? Okay, that's good. I'm going to talk really fast. This is coming from an outside world, sort of. So I hope that I can at least help you understand it. But I'm including a lot of references and things that you can look up later, because you can get the notes online after the talk is done. So we're going to talk about fonts. Who am I? If I look familiar, for many years I was a reporter embedded solely in the free software hacker community. I'm not sure what's going on. Anyway, I went away and I came back after a year and I'm working on font things these days. Fonts are weird. Let's just get that out there. In particular, they have this property where they are static shapes, but they get executed or parts of them get executed or at least interpreted by our renderer. There are certainly other components that we use in our free software stack that have this property themes for SDK. Come to mind, certainly SVGs, some web content, game resources, you can probably think of some others. So it's not alone in that respect. One distinct difference, though, is that users will use fonts on their system to create content of their own at will. And that's not necessarily true of the other things. So you may care about them in a different way because of this sort of distinction. In regards to how weird they are, you have to comply with their licenses. What happens if you don't? Let's look at some examples. You can get sued. This was a survey that this guy did just using the GitHub search API last year. Hundreds of thousands and the search API limits the hits that it returns. So probably more than that. Any commercial proprietary font you want to find probably in there. He was giving this talk to type designers. So this was foundries who will at least contact you and demand that you get a license. Lesser things can happen to MailPile is a mail app and they used a font that was free to use but not free to redistribute. They had to change that. You can inconvenience your own workflow if you don't pay attention to these things. You may just have other more practical matters. This is more well known. Wikimedia decided it couldn't buy licenses for everyone to recreate their logo and their wordmarks so they had to change the font they used in it. Anyway, when we talk about licensing issues, there's about three dimensions. We can examine they are not utility dimensions though. There's the law, there's the community norms and then there's the licenses that we actually use. Bear in mind though that community norms are subject to a lot of wiggle room depending on how you define both of those terms. So let's do the law really quick. The typeface is not copyrightable. When we say the typeface, we mean the design. The look as you see it if you're a human being. On the other hand, files are. Digital files are copyrightable. That's how a lot of software copyright and copy left works. Typeface names can be protected as trademarks and in fact that's the most common thing you're going to run into legally speaking. On the other hand, typefaces can be protected by design patents but that rarely happens. I think Adobe is the only foundry that ever does this as far as I'm aware and there's reasons for that that we'll see in a minute. And this is, I'm talking about how it works in the U.S. We can go back and see how we got here. These are the cases you can look up if you care about these things. 1974 Eltra tried to copyright a typeface and got told by I think Ringer was the copyright office, sure person however that works. No element either alone or in combination can be separately identified as a work of art. That doesn't feel good if you work on typefaces all the time I'm sure. In 1976 the Copyright Act I guess got revisited and the House Committee on this looked at it and said there's nothing here that fits into the meaning of the copyright bill. 1988 things changed a little bit. This is the first time that the copyright office distinguished between the design and software files and obviously in the 80s this is when the whole software industry was working through copyrights and ULAs and things like that which it hadn't done necessarily in decades past. 92 they revised that a little bit. Sorry I should back up actually. In this distinction that they made initially they said that your copyright notice should include a disclaimer about the design issue. In 92 they realized that didn't make any sense so they dropped that. How about everywhere else? Well Japan is explicitly the same as the US where you can't get a copyright. A lot of places, a lot of jurisdictions, there's no real case law or anything. The UK and Germany only two places I've found where there is copyright for typeface designs however that doesn't make any difference because you have to sell if you want to make a living in this you have to sell to anyone in the world and anyone in the US can buy your typeface and doesn't have to follow that. Is this urgent? There's a distinction there. He's saying that a typeface to meet the test of copyright ability in Germany has to pass an originality test. In any case they don't really bother because foundries in Germany want to sell to everywhere else in Europe and to the US. The patent thing comes from Adobe suing Softkey trying to get a patent on the typeface and they were told that you could get a design patent which is one of those funky things about the shape of your iPhone but you have to follow some conditions in advance like not showing the design to anyone for at least some predetermined amount of time a year or two I think. The trademark thing, this is what you normally see because it only makes sense that the name is what people see in the font menu after all and you generally want to have your company name somewhere visible for these people so it's sort of the only option available and that's why it gets so much attention. Another example I don't know if anyone recognizes this name Rasmus Anderson he has this font that he released called interface in 2017 a web guy worked for Facebook I think some other places made it big with Jobbox. He announced this typeface on August 27th that's the Twitter URL this is the announcement. After a year of work here it is you can see the time on there 5am I assume there's some this is just what I looked at at whatever jurisdiction I was in. That's what it looks like it's on the left on the right is Roboto because he basically took Roboto and tweaked it which sort of came up when people started getting angry at him but just a few hours later somebody said by the way there's already a font called interface where you wear that and this is what that link was interface that already existed was by Dalton Mog. Dalton Mog created the Ubuntu font they actually work on a lot of free software projects they're not going to take this lightly and if you were reading ahead you see his response yeah I knew about that this is not going to end well with him obviously. In fact it didn't just a few weeks later Dalton Mog mentioned this to GitHub and he had to change the name of the font to enter UI is that better or worse I will try not to take a position on that. The best irony I found on this is someone responding to him said hey what would happen if he took a common word like Dropbox and tried to type right there and he was like yeah but that's not a common word I don't know how he defines common but word existed certainly and I think my take on this is that when all you have is the trademark you're going to defend that with no gray area. In the fossil world in general for name collisions we kind of put up with those in hopes that unless someone is dying goodwill will just take care of the problem how did we get to this situation to understand it why is a typeface not copyrightable? You have to understand that copying designs of other people has always been part of how typefaces were made. People have complained about this this is 1929 Rudolf Koch is a very famous designer from Germany and he was like this is highway robbery Americans stealing my designs. It went the other direction too it really picked up speed in the 1840s with stereotyping that word as we use it today it comes from this process where you take a mold of plaster or something of a bunch of metal type set out in the page and then you electro plate it and you get a plate that you can use without the original metal and people would just use this to copy their competitors designs and some foundries in Skada which is a Dutch foundry just sort of stopped making new stuff of their own and made that their entire business. It kind of got worse in the 1880s when you had milling machines that could sort of automate creating the original version and not having to go through the electroplating process but it's actually older than that. Going back to like the day after Gutenberg went into business there are people okay I can do that too and in a sense you copy what's successful what your competitors are offering you want to offer that too and you know it's possible because up until the mid 20th century the typeface was not a product it's important to understand that originally typefaces were something that the printer had to make in order to print the book and the book was the product and that changed when industrialization took over because then the real business you wanted to be in was making printing products, making printers making printing presses and things like that and that continued up until the 1960s and 70s and for those people the product is the printing machine or the type setting machine. The typeface or the font is just a feature of that but that did change in the 80s bitstream you may have heard that. In 1981 some designers left Linotype and started bitstream and they took with them all the fonts in the Linotype library. Linotype was still in the machine business at that time. They said they had permission not everyone agrees with that. They certainly weren't the only people to sort of take this approach compugraphic with them and started this whole sale copying other people's stuff. And today we have this weird situation where there's a lot of similar fonts from competing companies. A lot of those are refivals which is another interesting thing to look at. You have a really old typeface from hundreds of years ago. Is it okay to reproduce it yourself? Well if you search on a site like MyFonts which is sort of a general index you can turn up hundreds of things for Grand John or Garamond which are the same look it was immediately mislabeled with Garamond and then they figured out Grand John was the guy's name and they're not all the same but everyone has it and they are all basically in the same model. This is acceptable this is a community norm thing and one of the reasons it's acceptable as long as the designer is no longer alive anyway is that we can't escape from the past. Language you don't reinvent the alphabet no one will use it. It has to be something people recognize. So the norm is don't do this when someone is still alive and make sure you credit the source. The best comparison I can come up with to this is it's a bit like musical quotation. You can do variations on a theme by Bach but you're supposed to mention that it's variations on something by Bach and acknowledgment sort of recognizes this that it comes from the past and that language is something that has this context that's unavoidable. It's also some practical issues here that no two people will do a revival the same way. This URL there's a talk from the A-Type I conference here by Eric Blockland which is currently offline. They're moving from Vimeo to YouTube I think. He gave the same in raster form to 74 people and asked them to digitize it. You don't get the same thing back from all those people. So this is another reason the community norm is it's okay to revive someone else's design because you're not going to get the same thing at the end of it. This is a really famous quote by Matthew Carter who's a designer. You see this other places. You don't need to read this. He's talking about Galliard which is his version of this grand john that everyone has done and he says here oh I didn't actually base it on real drawings I based it on his style. Okay more pertinent though if he goes into detail is that well you know the original thing from hundreds of years ago doesn't tell me everything I need to know for today. I have to do new character sets and things and there's stuff he didn't have to deal with. So yeah this is another practical reason why revivals are accepted. An interesting corner case happened here in Belgium though Sands Guild. This was 2011 open source publishing which is sort of an artist collective. Is there anyone here from OSP? Someone is in town and was maybe going to be here. They auto-traced the Guild Sands and I mean in software auto-traced it and then released it as a font. They were doing a workshop. They did some other things as well the same weekend and there's a blog post about it here. They wrote a letter to monotype which owns Guild Sands corporately to tell them about this and to state their reasoning and then they mentioned it on typophile which is a discussion forum for type people. The reaction from the community was okay that's fine although they didn't think that the results of the auto-tracing itself were all that great and they didn't get a response from monotype from the legal people anyway although what I heard in email just recently was they did later monotype did get in touch about a different project of theirs about the name collision for the trademark reasons and my take on this is that without copyright on the design trademarks just evolved this way to bear the bulk of the legal protection it's important to understand that hundreds of years ago typefaces didn't have names when the printer just made it because they needed to print something that happened again with industrialization when people were trying to sell a catalog to you of what you got with their printer and trademarks are a big concern for open fonts. There's some rough standards community norms you kind of have you know Adobe Minion Pro Minion is probably something that they have a trademark on but there's this basic idea that people can use a common name and the middle wall as long as they specify their name before it and if there's more than one version you put that as a suffix on the end but it's really a bigger issue because of what our open font licenses tell us to do and that brings us to the third dimension here the open font license normally the one we mean we talk about open fonts you're probably thinking yeah but there's actually more than that because there's the GPL with the font embedding exception which predates the open font license by a few months. I went to the Debian archive there's a lot of licenses on font packages out there they didn't all fit on the slide you'll find Apache, you went to font license various iterations of the X project the Aladdin Free Public License, anyone use GoScript, it's a different license there's a Lattec license in there, PTFFL is a paratype it's somebody who made their own license, sticks is math fonts license, GPL without the exception if you want to go down a rabbit hole just research this this is the font where the legal status for it being free is the public statement somebody of the company made have fun with that and in reality if you're running a free operating system you will have to deal with non free fonts as well varying degrees of non free there's academic fonts that people want to use and people will install the Microsoft core fonts because they want to but if you're working on a government project Dubai font is what you have to use if you're working on a red hat corporate thing the red hat corporate font is interstate which is not an open font so they have to exist on the same system I hate to be the bearer of bad news but mostly when we talk about open fonts we mean the open font license this is the URL for it in 2005 version 1.1 was just a clarification of wording it was created by SIL which is a non profit that does linguistic work and they did it in conjunction with discussions with type designers and in a lot of ways it's really more like a free content license it deals with use and redistribution and modification it says derivatives have to be OFL and nothing else it talks about embedding it says that the document you build with the font doesn't take on the font's license has a simple termination clause one thing it doesn't mention though is source code you can apply OFL to your sources but you don't have to it makes sense if you do I mean you can say it applies to a painting but it just doesn't mean anything and in particular it doesn't say anything about the source format so there's plenty of OFL fonts where there's no source at all and there's OFL fonts where the source is in something like VFB which is a binary undocumented format used by font lab which was a big font editor 10-15 years ago you don't have to have any build scripts you don't have to know how what options were used to generate the font and the upshot of that is that just being under the OFL doesn't make it compliant with some standards like Vivian and Free Software Guidelines that's not my opinion you actually get the package blocked for upload if it doesn't have buildable source and there's a lot of those packages ending up that can contribute and non-free other oddities worth mentioning you are required to bundle and executable if you sell the font this can be a simple script but it's sort of it was designed to assuage the fears of type designers and then there's the other thing I want to talk about as we mentioned there's two versions of this there's two versions of this except there's actually four versions because there's a functional clause called the reserve font name clause it's the third clause I think and it says any modified version has to rename the font because I've reserved this name obviously this stems from the trademark issue right and the font issue that's the actual text of it right there is the font name as presented to the users right and it's in the definition section you have to put it in the copyright statement at the very beginning and they're very clear about what modified version means that deletes or substitutes the original accounts and that includes things like sub-setting a font if you're serving it over the web you maybe don't want to send the full font especially if it's Chinese which is very large so that's triggered automatically in those cases and it includes rebuilding the font if the result is not bit identical and that can be problematic SIL has an FAQ about this because it sort of became a bigger issue and but they're very clear do font rebuilds necessitated name change yes they do in my opinion this means that you really need to be treating this as a different license it's different requirements imposed on you if you're using it google fonts I have some google fonts published they told everyone who had an RFN they had to rename it or you're creating a separate version for us without the RFN because we can't do all this and still manage the project often violations happen let's look at an example Cardo it's a Debian package I think it's in contrib that's the url this is the home page it's a medievalist font you may think you're medieval but are you the medievalist look at the news here number two I'm going to show you what that says be careful there's unauthorized versions out there they're not the same people are taking things out reducing the character said he's upset about this right home page if you see where that icon is that's where the license begins copyright statement very beginning copyright David J Perry with reserve font name Cardo okay the package is in Debian let's look at the copyright file there copyright David J Perry no mention of the reserve font name how did that happen and there's a changelog that says we had to take the manual out because the manual has these weird conditions on it now as it turns out the Cardo zip file you download doesn't include the OFL as a separate file but it is in this manual it's a PDF I can tell you that it's also in the font binary in the proper field so this is a bug yeah I promise I won't file an issue about it I wanted it this will be true when I was talking about it today though but my opinion is this stems from us not recognizing that the RFN effectively makes this a distinct license that we have to deal with and fonts out there I would ballpark it as like half it's certainly not like a 5% thing and they have violations trivial to find literally Cardo was the first one I opened up when I decided to try and find one in the Debian archive and the interesting thing is that I think most people who use RFNs in their fonts are actually wanting some trademark protection and it's just it's available to them so they choose it so I think we could do a better job of offering them something trademarks in general maybe you don't get as much attention and free software is you know patents and copyrights to do I attempted to I took a stab at this and I haven't actually pushed anything out to this repository but I think it's worth revisiting like you can offer people maybe a shall we say boilerplate trademark statement the difficult thing that I found when I was looking at this is how to determine what's useful for developers I think maybe not triggering it on sub-setting would be useful maybe you could have an option where you just say okay you can make a derivative font you just have to tack a suffix onto the end of your use of the name I don't know but the whole way RFN affects packages and the way it affects downstream projects and people who use the fonts I haven't really been talked about I would like to discuss that ask me there's a lot more in terms of actually that we could have talked about on the subject of font licensing there's some really interesting questions about how much you change a font before it's different and how you attribute people but yeah I'm happy to take questions on anything I mentioned today yeah I the question is fonts these days include things like you're talking about open type feature rules which are substitution rules that match sequences and then say replace this with a ligature and those can actually get very complicated in index scripts and in Arabic where they have to do a lot more shaping than we use so yeah that's sort of in that gray area where okay it's not general purpose terrain complete language stuff that you're dealing with but it is meant to be run by an interpreter or a renderer that executes these instructions yeah there's other issues involved there to like the fact that people don't really share that code even when they're working on open fonts there may be some benefits to treating that more like source code that we could learn from and study but yeah it's every time they revise open type it gets more complicated and so the code component gets bigger while the visual component kind of stays the same anybody else well okay the question is does the reserve font name better I guess it depends it probably depends on what your trademark policy is like for other things I will note that you don't have to put the full name of the font as the reserve part and this is something a lot of people probably don't realize either SIL which created it their fonts are officially called SIL Gentium or something like that and in the copyright statement they've used that to say you can make a derivative and call it Gentium but just don't call it SIL Gentium and that's probably a good middle ground for people I think it's sort of just not well understood by people who release fonts yeah like I don't think I knew that until I started putting the talk together a couple weeks ago so yeah that's true too it's the consumer issue a lot of the stuff is just hidden from people and that's kind of true for licensing of fonts in general people will just they know they have to get a license to use it on the web or to use it in an app or something but the details probably most people don't look at yes so the question is if you have an open source project and you have to interact with type designers with graphic designers okay with anyone if someone is making logos and material for you using a font what do you have to worry about you're not in that case you're probably not dealing with the issue of making derivatives of the font so the derivative triggered RFN clause probably doesn't matter to you and in fact a lot of the other details dealing with derivatives probably don't matter what you want is for anyone to be able to download a copy of the font and use it in Inkscape or in Scribes or whatever the designers should have a license that's true I will make a comment about Nate's talk it is very rare organizers are very expert about this Nate's talk was really amazing and we are so glad that he did all this work to study it and I really want to thank Nate again for being here