Phinney on Fonts

“Do companies get sued for using fonts illegally?”

Written by

Thomas Phinney

in

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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.

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!

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