What a font licence actually covers

A font is software, and you do not own the copy you paid for any more than you own Photoshop. What you bought is permission to do specific things with it. Most people never read which things, find out years later, and the finding out is expensive.

This is the map. It applies to every foundry, not just this one.

The four licences, and what each one is really for

Almost every foundry sells some arrangement of these. The names vary; the boundaries do not.

Desktop. Install the file on a computer and make things with it — artwork, documents, a logo, packaging. What leaves your hands is a picture of the letters: a PDF, a JPEG, a printed box. The font file stays with you.

Web. Serve the font file itself from your website so a stranger's browser downloads it. The file leaves your hands, which is why this is a separate licence, and why it is usually metered by pageviews.

App. Embed the file inside a mobile app, a desktop app or a game. Same principle: the file ships inside the thing.

Broadcast / ePub / logo. The odd corners. Some foundries carve out television, e-books, or trademarked logos as extras. Check before you build a brand on one.

The numbers they count

This is where the surprises are, because the units are not the ones you would guess.

Desktop counts installations

Not people. Not machines you own. Installations. A five-seat desktop licence means the file may be installed on five computers. Your laptop and your desktop are two.

The rule people break without knowing: sending the file to your printer, your agency or your freelancer is a distribution, and they need their own licence or a seat on yours. It is also the single most common breach, because it does not feel like one — you are sending a file so somebody can finish your job.

Web counts pageviews

Usually monthly, often in bands: 10k, 100k, 1M, unlimited. Some foundries count unique visitors instead, which is a different and much smaller number — check which.

Two traps:

• The count is usually per licence, not per site. Three sites at 40k each may exceed a 100k licence.
• Traffic grows. A licence bought at launch is not a licence at year three, and nobody sends you a reminder.

App counts installs or titles

Per app title, or per number of installs, or both. A game with a sequel is usually two titles.

The four expensive mistakes

1. Using a trial or "personal use" font commercially. Free font sites are full of files whose licence says personal use only. That phrase means no client work, no products, no logo — not "no money changed hands". Foundries do pursue this, and the demand letter is priced at what the licence would have cost, plus damages.

2. Converting a desktop font to WOFF2 and serving it. Technically trivial, and it is exactly the thing the desktop licence does not permit. The file left your hands.

3. Embedding a font in a PDF nobody told you was an app. Embedding for viewing and printing is allowed by most desktop licences. Embedding editable — where the recipient can extract and reuse the font — usually is not. The difference is a setting in your export dialog.

4. Assuming the licence transfers. Agency buys font, agency makes brand, client uses brand. The client has no licence. Somebody has to buy one, and it is better to decide who before the invoice.

Open licences are not the same as free

SIL Open Font License (OFL) is the good one and the one most open fonts use. It permits commercial use, modification and redistribution, with two real conditions: the font itself may not be sold on its own, and a modified version may not use a Reserved Font Name. Bundling an OFL font inside a commercial product is fine. Selling the font by itself is not.

Apache 2.0 covers a handful of fonts (most of Google's earlier releases) and is more permissive still.

"Free for personal use" is not an open licence. It is a commercial licence with the commercial part removed.

What to keep

If anybody ever asks — a client's legal team, an acquirer's due diligence, a foundry's compliance email — you want to be able to answer in a minute rather than a week.

• The licence document or receipt, in the project folder, not in an inbox
• Which scope you bought, and the numbers attached to it
• When, and for which entity — the licence belongs to a company, not to you
• A note of where the font is used, so you know what a traffic change affects

How we do it, and why

We sell two scopes, and the line between them is that one question: does the file leave your hands?

Media and documents is the desktop licence without the word desktop. "Desktop" named the machine the work was done on, which stopped meaning anything when design moved into the browser, and it left people counting seats to decide whether they were allowed to make a slide. Ours is per company, with no limit on the work and no seats to count.

Web and apps is the file itself — websites, web apps, mobile apps, games. Per company, any number of sites, and no pageview bands. A licence that expires when you succeed is a licence that punishes you for succeeding.

Both are one payment. Neither expires. Every licence gets a number and a public page at /verify so that somebody's legal department can check it without writing to us — which is the thing most foundries make hardest and it costs nothing to make easy.

That is not a claim that our terms are better than everyone's. It is a claim that they fit on one page, and you should be able to say the same about whichever licence you are about to agree to.