I’ve been licensing fonts for my entire career. Hundreds of them over the years, whether it was Adobe’s Font Folio, or fonts from Emigre, House Industries, T-26, or Grilli Type. I always assumed that when I paid for a font license, I was paying for something with clear intellectual property protection—like software or music.
Turns out that assumption might be wrong.
Matthew Butterick, a copyright litigator who also happens to be a type designer and author of the great reference, Practical Typography, lays out why digital fonts probably aren’t protected by U.S. copyright law:
Fonts have traditionally been excluded from U.S. copyright protection. This principle was judicially affirmed in the 1978 case Eltra Corp. v. Ringer (“typeface has never been considered entitled to copyright”).
The type industry has operated for decades on a workaround: register fonts as software programs rather than as typefaces. A 1998 case, Adobe v. Southern Software, seemed to validate this approach. But a recent ruling in Laatz v. Zazzle pokes holes in that reasoning. Butterick on the implications:
To those in the type industry who have staked a lot on the Adobe case, that last sentence might be a doozy. The Laatz court’s perspective debunks decades of wishful thinking about the breadth of the Adobe opinion. Under the Laatz view, unless you “created the software that produced the font programs”, you don’t fall within the scope of the Adobe ruling.
That distinction is wild. If you designed a typeface using FontLab or Glyphs—as most type designers do nowadays—you might not have the copyright protection you thought you had, because you didn’t write the software that generated the final font file.
Given all this legal uncertainty, how does Butterick run his own type foundry? He’s refreshingly pragmatic:
My business necessarily runs on something more akin to the honor system. I try to make nice fonts, price my licenses fairly, and thereby make internet strangers enthusiastic about sending me money rather than going to pirate websites. Enough of them do. My business continues.
I don’t have a strong opinion on the legal questions here—I’m not a lawyer or a type designer. But as someone who’s spent a lot of money on fonts over the years, I find it fascinating that the whole edifice might be built on shakier ground than any of us realized. And yes, I absolutely want to support the type designers who sweat the details by giving them cash money.
