Originally posted on Quora, in response to a user question. Due to Quora’s increasingly desperate and user-hostile changes, I revised and reposted it here.
Last update 29 May 2024.
Yes, companies often get threatened with legal action, and (less often) if they do not pay for their font use, get sued. Many companies have been: (1) threatened with legal action, (2) pretty much forced to pay what they already should have, and/or (3) sued for using fonts in unlicensed ways.
Sometimes (but rarely) these cases are dismissed. Usually they are settled, outside the courtroom. The only case I can think of that was even partially decided by the court was Adobe vs SSI, way back in 1998, wherein Adobe won a partial summary judgment on a number of key points. But even this was more a corporate piracy case involving people selling ripped-off fonts rather than a normal business-use case. In general, the business and personal use cases never get as far as being decided by a court.
Software and services have spring up around this. There are apps for managing fonts both for individuals and across organizations (Connect Fonts, FontBase, and others), and legal compliance concerns are part of their appeal. Some font management apps have been renamed (Suitcase Fusion and Universal Type Server are now Extensis Connect Fonts) or discontinued (so many, notably FontXplorer). There are entire businesses set up around font license compliance consulting, and services that help font foundries find unlicensed font use on the web (and optionally collect money for them).
Here are over 20 lawsuits around unlicensed font use. I have excluded cases where a type designer, font foundry or distributor has sued another type designer, foundry or distributor, although that happens occasionally as well.
- Nike Sued for Allegedly Using Unlicensed Fonts in Advertising & Marketing (Feb 2023, Production Type v Nike)
- Into the Sparkly Heart of Zazzle’s Font War (Nov 2022, Nicky Laatz v Zazzle) (disclaimer: I am an expert witness in this case)
- Shake Shack Accuses Typeface Co. of Font IP “Shakedown” (Sept 2022, Shake Shack v. House Industries) OK, this one is actually a reverse, where Shake Shack is suing House for threatening legal action in the first place.
- Rite Aid says TM lawsuit over logo is poorly designed (May 2022, Brand Design d.b.a. House Industries v Rite-Aid)
- Banana Republic in legal battle over distinctive ampersand (Nov 2020, Moshik Nadav)
- Miracle Mop inventor “stole” my font for her new logo: lawsuit (Oct 2019, Moshik Nadav claims wrong license for logo font)
- Font Diner sues Haribo over packaging design of its Halloween sweets (Nov 2017 for $150,000)
- A Different “Type” of Lawsuit (Berthold vs Target over Akzidenz-Grotesk, Oct 2017, $150,000 per infringement)
- Font Maker Sues Universal Music over Vamps logo (Hype for Type vs Universal Music Group over Vamps logo usage, Aug 2017, $1.25M plus destruction of infringing materials)
- Berthold says Volvo violated its copyright regarding typeface (Jun 2017, $1.5M)
- Cher wins dismissal of lawsuit over album cover font (Moshik Nadav sued Cher, but dropped the case in March 2017)
- French anti-piracy agency used unlicensed, proprietary font (Jean François Porchez threatened to sue the anti-piracy agency for, essentially piracy, 2016) Connexion France, Boing Boing / Doctorow
- My Little Pony toymaker sued over alleged font misuse – BBC News (Font Bros vs Hasbro over Generation B, Jan 2016, $150,000 per infringement)
- Berthold sues Scripps Networks Interactive (PDF download) (Aug 2014)
- Microsoft Sued for $1.5 Million Over Hebrew Type Font (Sep 2013, $1.5M)
- FontDiner v CafePress (April 2013, $900,000+)
- Mixpanel sued for $2 million over font in shared Tumblr theme by Font Diner (Mar 2013, $2M)
- NBCUniversal Sued for $3.5 Million Over Font Theft…Again (Exclusive) / NBC Universal sued for $3.5 million for font license infringement by Brand Design a.k.a. House Industries (July 2012 $3.5M)
- Lawsuit Claims TNT’s “Falling Skies” Has a Font Problem by +ISM Studios (Jan 2012, $200,000)—this was settled out of court, details unknown.
- Copyright and Web Fonts: Santorum Web Developer Sued for Typeface Infringement in Typotheque v Raise Digital (Aug 2011, $2M)
- Harry Potter and the Dangers of Font Non-Compliance / NBC Universal Accused of Million-Dollar ‘Harry Potter’ Font Theft by P22 (Jul 2011)—this was settled out of court, details unknown.
- Font Bureau clashes with NBC over font licensing (Oct 2009, $2M)
- The above list stops in 2010. It also excludes lawsuits between designers/foundries/distributors. There is one I believe must be mentioned, because one of the very few font copyright cases to proceed to any kind of conclusion in the USA, with summary judgment on the matter of whether Adobe’s digital fonts were protected by copyright (the judge found they were, but his decision is not precedential, although nonetheless widely followed as one of the few “clues” as to how a court might find on these issues).
Sometimes these things stop short of a lawsuit, but can still be pretty unpleasant. I don’t actually buy the old saying “there is no such thing as bad publicity”:
There exist multiple online scanners that look for fonts posted online or used in web sites. Some are owned by major retailers/distributors, but at least one is available to any type designer or foundry that wants to pay for it (license infringement monitoring/DMCA service aka Fontdata aka TypeSnitch) which might or might not be the same thing as Font Radar.
Heck, I won’t name the offending party, but in one of my day jobs, we once got a nasty cease-and-desist email from a lawyer from a well-known font company—I knew the owners and had been to their offices! The lawyer claimed we were using two different fonts, in different ways, illegally. He was wrong, of course, but we still got the letter. (And never heard back from the lawyer when we explained how he was mistaken.)
Cases such as the one Sergey Yakunin cites of Sberbank with Fedra Sans and Fedra Serif are not unusual, it is just that one usually doesn’t hear about them. Often they are pursued without major public attention. Lots of negotiations behind the scenes, the foundry usually gets paid what they should have in the first place, and maybe not everyone is happy, but at least things are resolved in some vaguely reasonable way.
Here are a couple more high-profile unlicensed use cases that are well-known in the industry (discussed in public forums, etc.) but did not get major media attention:
For more like that, see also:
And finally, a general piece on font piracy, from Wired Magazine.
ADDENDUM
The original question I was answering on Quora featured these details in a comment (one of the things the “new Quora” unhelpfully suppresses!): “I am starting a new company. I have found a font that I want to use on my website (est. traffic 10 000/month). I have purchased desktop license, though if I understand correctly, I am not allowed to use it on my website. Do companies actually get sued for using fonts illegally?”
For their particular case, I’ll point out that the licensing required, at that volume level, tends to be pretty cheap. They would waste more money-as-time reading the links in this post than just getting legal, either for a one-time fee, or something like $25/year (low-end rate for Adobe Typekit). Or even free if one uses Google Fonts, though that would not get them the commercial fonts you are talking about.
Also, illegal use of a font on a web site is something you are doing in public, and accessible to web crawlers and the like—as previously mentioned above. I know of at least one general-purpose service for scanning for illegal font use, and I know of at least one foundry that runs their own bots to scan for their fonts being used illegally. So if I was going to use a font illegally, the one way I definitely would not try to do so would be on a web site as a web font!