fonts and that

March 14, 2005 1:20 PM

I am looking for a free font that can be used royalty free (ie. 100% free in all respects) in potentially commercial material.

I am designing a logo for a small baby related company who are offering a small reward for a succesful design, and I want a font that won't cost me money in either acquiring it, or using it in commercial works.

As an additional, are there any free programs (for winxp) that will allow me to make my own fonts?

posted by iamcrispy to computers & internet (8 comments total)

I was under the impression that fonts you own already (i.e., with your operating system) do not require any royalty payments for commercial use. If they do, I think there are a lot of foundries that are owed a lot of money.
posted by spaghetti at 2:01 PM on March 14, 2005

I've been enjoying fontleech lately. The freefont licenses vary widely though.

One thing that might protect you would be to set up the logo text in Illustrator, convert to outlines, then manually tweak the letterforms.
posted by omnidrew at 2:10 PM on March 14, 2005

I'll point you towards fontforge for software, iamcrispy.

Also note that, if you don't mind the ire of typographers world wide, in a lot of countries tracing the fonts and then repackaging them absolves them of copyright.
posted by shepd at 3:05 PM on March 14, 2005

I'll bet a good deal of the fonts at 1001fonts.com are completely 100% free. (A good deal of the fonts there are also completely 100% crap.)

Am I allowed to self-post in AskMe? If yes, I can vouch for the fonts I designed - here - as being entirely free (but not necessarily any good).
posted by tepidmonkey at 4:57 PM on March 14, 2005

Fonts are not subject to U.S. copyright law.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 7:34 PM on March 14, 2005

all good answers, thankyou. Its quite interesting that no fonts are copyrighted, I always used to make sure I didn't use any fonts I had downloaded when making websites just incase.

anyway, tepidmonkey, I think I may be using your 'medrano' font for the logo. thankyou very much.
posted by iamcrispy at 9:02 AM on March 15, 2005

monju_bosatsu: That earlier ruling refered to bitmap fonts. The vast majority of fonts are defined mathmatically by curves and are considered to be "software". As such, they are subject to copyright law. In 1992 the U.S. Copyright Office stated the following:

"... the Copyright Office is persuaded that creating scalable typefonts using already-digitized typeface represents a significant change in the industry since our previous [September 29, 1988] Policy Decision. We are also persuaded that computer programs designed for generating typeface in conjunction with low resolution and other printing devices may involve original computer instructions entitled protection under the Copyright Act. 57 FR 6202.

This was backed up in a Summary Judgement against SSI in 1998 that can be found here.
posted by Monk at 10:20 AM on March 15, 2005

Ah, thanks for the correction, Monk.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 11:14 AM on March 15, 2005