While this is true, isn’t that exactly the same argument as for any other form of DRM? He goes so far as to casually dismiss the argument that IP itself is the problem at the end (“the only other option—that the type industry cede its intellectual property to the public without permission—is not going to happen”), so it’s not like it just didn’t occur to him.
– Chris
Wow, it’s like you were reading my mind.
I was about to buy a copy of the font Whitney the other day, but then I read typography.com’s FAQ and saw I couldn’t use it to publish my resume PDF. Since I don’t intend to publish my resume as a PNG, I kept my $200+.
Sadness.
— Jeffrey 
Ha ha, look at the funny man who spends $200 for a font for his resume ;-)
— Marcus
The foundries are already screwed. They just don’t know it yet.
We’ve seen this argument play out in audio, in video, and in the written word. Open distribution always wins. What makes the typographers think they will succeed when all the other efforts at controlling distribution have failed?
I love fonts. The right font can make text come alive. But if I can’t use it on the web, it’s just a pretty museum piece behind glass. And only serious art buffs or collectors will care. The rest of us will simply use what’s available.
Font Foundries aren’t trying to sell their product to people who can’t tell a serif from a hole in their head. They are selling them to people who care about quality, who don’t want to wait another 10 years until some open-source project finally releases a decent font with decent hinting.
Microsoft was willing to implement a very simple mechanism so that people who care about quality can use good fonts *right now* (actually, since 1997 when Internet Explorer 4.0 introduced support for it). I wish other browser makers would implement the same simple mechanism. It would have taken less time for them to implement it than they’ve spent trying to argue for a slightly different mechanism to be used instead. Otherwise, the people you refer to as “our people” will just keep using Flash and other hacks like they’ve been doing for a long time now. Really, which is worse, EOT or sIFR?
By the way, an EOT file is likely to be much smaller (at worst a few hundred bytes larger) than the TTF file it was generated from, so bandwidth arguments work in its favor.
Hey, you gotta spend money to make money.
— Pavel
I for one could care less about fonts used to spruce up newsletters. The impact of that is nothing compared to the impact that embedded fonts will have on languages which are not traditionally well supported by operating systems.
There are still tons of people on the planet who have to jump through extra hoops just to write their own language. As a result, the millions of people who speak Yoruba or Tibetan or Tuareg or Navajo or myriad of other languages still have very little content on the web, and miserably small Wikipedias. This situation is due in large part not just to a lack of free fonts, but to the difficulty of installing such free fonts as exist. Embedded fonts, hopefully, will help to change this situation.
— Pat Hall
http://a.deveria.com/caniuse/#feat=fontface&&hideopts=1 is a little bit better in illustrating the timeline for @font-face
Hmm, how confusing – there’s that Open Font Library at http://openfontlibrary.fontly.org/ (with a grand total of 12 fonts), and a different Open Font Library at http://www.openfontlibrary.org/ (with 151).
On a slight tangent: I had some difficulty finding a set of fonts to use when developing http://fonts.philip.html5.org/ (which creates somewhat-optimised subsets of large font files). Most ‘free’ fonts don’t allow modification; some don’t render sufficiently correctly on all platforms; many are tweaks of other fonts for specialised purposes. The ones listed on that page are pretty much all the ones I could find that worked and were worth adding.
There’s a lot more variety if you just want no-cost use-for-any-purpose-but-do-not-modify fonts, which is what most people understand as “free fonts”. Hopefully the emphasis of the web font movement will be on truly open fonts.
— Philip Taylor
“We’ve seen this argument play out in audio, in video, and in the written word. Open distribution always wins.”
Indeed. The unfortunate thing is that “winning” can also kill some of the things we valued about the loser, in a baby-with-the-bathwater kind of way. Case in point: newspapers.
— bonaldi
RE: “Wow, it’s like you were reading my mind.
I was about to buy a copy of the font Whitney the other day, but then I read typography.com’s FAQ and saw I couldn’t use it to publish my resume PDF. Since I don’t intend to publish my resume as a PNG, I kept my $200+.”
I recommend spending more time working on the stuff that you write about in your resume and less time on how you write about it, but thats just my opinion.
— John Lewin
font-family: ‘Gill Sans’,'Gill Sans MT’,'Ikarius ADF’,Candara,Jara,sans-serif;
Huh?
— What?
@John Lewin
That’s kind of a dick thing to say without seeing his resumé. Maybe he’s finely tuned and going the extra mile.
— Jeremy Dunck
@What?: Do you have a problem with Mark’s font choices? I think he’s gone out of his way to make the site look pleasant using some of the default typefaces available across various platforms.
EOT as anti-piracy measure is red herring. It can be stripped from “DRM” in a matter of seconds, and if it ever gets popular, it will be done casually. I promise you to write 1-click tool or web service that pirates any font, if EOT ever raises from the dead.
— kL
fuck all yall haterz
Comic Sans is the best font i would put this comment in it if i could
— Shook Ones
> We’ve seen this argument play out in audio, in video, and in the written word. Open distribution always wins.
Fonts are not media. Fonts are software. What do you suggest as a revenue model for distributing fonts?
> What do you suggest as a revenue model for distributing fonts?
To quote Bruce Schneier, “Truth be told, I don’t know. I feel rather like the physicist who just explained relativity to a group of would-be interstellar travelers, only to be asked: ‘How do you expect us to get to the stars, then?’ I’m sorry, but I don’t know that, either.”
And this rant is my statement that I’m done trying. Real people — even professionals like Zeldman — have been trying to buy from these foundries for YEARS. Note the very bit I quoted: “I want to use your ITC Franklin in a site I’m designing.” Zeldman WANTS to be a customer. He WANTS to throw money at them. They’ve said no, consistently and unapologetically. So fuck them. They deserve what they get.
— Mark
> Font Foundries aren’t trying to sell their product to people who can’t tell a serif from a hole in their head. They are selling them to people who care about quality
Exactly. Just like newspapers are for people who appreciate serious journalism, and iPods will never take off because MP3s sound like shit.
— Mark
> They’ve said no, consistently and unapologetically.
Well, “unapologetically” is just bad business, and I’m certain it’s not how all font makers behave. The problem is that the font industry is a small, fragmented group of small businesses. Yes, it’s taking ages to develop a solution, but it’s not for lack of desire.
> By the way, an EOT file is likely to be much smaller (at worst a few hundred bytes larger) than the TTF file it was generated from
Yeah, except TTF files can do that trick too, without requiring some Windows-only tool that understands some proprietary Microsoft format.
Thanks for playing, though. Do come again.
— Mark
This is my problem with a lot of things, particularly DRM, but certainly destroys todays business models that rely heavily on IP. My question is, why is it the consumers fault and responsibility to protect YOUR IP? When did it become OK to absolve yourself of the responsibility of protecting your product simply by enabling you to screw anyone you want that’s using it?
If people collectively REJECTED products, even if they’re incredibly useful, simply because the developer feels like taking the lazy route to protecting them, then it wouldn’t be long before the entire culture changed.. and then we’d have a little more ethics in business.
— Defektiv
If fonts are software, then I fail to see why we should have different expectations for their licensing, revenue models, and distribution than we do for, say, operating system kernels, web servers, and browsers…
Have you ever met a type designer?
I’m stereotyping off my single experience, but was exactly what you’d expect: The most snooty, egocentric, self-important anti-social bastard I’ve ever had the displeasure of dealing with.
Yes, this is an ad-hominem attack but my point is this: The pretentious hubris I experienced from Mr. Fonty is identical to the vibe from the foundries.
> I’m stereotyping off my single experience
Then why say it at all? This is the kind of us vs. them dynamic that leaves us all stagnant.
I remember – before I even worked for Mozilla – discussing @font-face and the possibility of downloadable fonts for webpages. Someone brought up the licensing issue, and all I could think of was: man, I’m glad that we didn’t ask the stock photography and image companies to advise us on how to regulate the download and display of images.
Yes, there will be some bad actors who use fonts on their webpages that they don’t have license to. Just like there are bad (or uninformed) actors who use images, text, audio and video content that they don’t have license to. The recourse is the same as any license infringement – send a cease and desist letter. Why are we even considering giving special DRM privileges to a single industry? Because graphic designers have lived with this bullshit (“hey, can you send me that file so I can adjust the date? oh, crap, I don’t have the font you used so I can’t alter it without paying someone a bunch of money …”) for years. Let’s not carry their baggage over to the web, mmkay?
typeface prices are way low already.
Its normal people invest time to protect their work.
Change that and you will have more solutions.
Instead of that we have to re-invent the wheel
to promote our work.
— type.nasos
A step forward: Tal Leming on a new Web Font Format.
Berlow: The next step is for those who control the font format(s) to define and document a permissions table to be added with all due haste to the OpenType, CoolType, TrueType, and FreeType formats. …
If the solution you propose to fix a hole in your business model is for the entire rest of the world to alter the way it works, you’re doomed.
> TTF files can do that trick too, without requiring some Windows-only tool that understands some proprietary Microsoft format.
TTF is still missing some of the tricks – it can’t use “Monotype Imaging’s patented MicroType® Express font compression technology” like in EOT. (But I have no idea how much that helps in practice, or what the patent licensing situation is.)
Also, that particular TTF-subsetting tool generates EOTs too, so you don’t need a Windows-only tool. (It’s a few dozen lines of trivial code to add the EOT header, based on the public documentation of the file format). Seems a bit of a waste of time compared to just using TTF, though.
— Philip Taylor
As a type designer I feel like I have to step in and say something here. First off the majority of typefaces designed in the past twenty years haven’t been made by big foundries but by individuals working on type in their spare time. Second, typefaces receive no copyright protection in the United States so copying font files and renaming them for sale is pretty much legal. Third, fonts have been available on peer-to-peer networks since before the days of Napster and in 2000 it was estimated that only one out of fifty instances of a typeface file (postscript or TrueType files) was paid for, and it has only gotten worse.
I have over forty commercial typefaces available for sale through various type re-sellers around the world and my average yearly income off the typefaces is $115, even though I regularly see my typefaces in use on the web, on TV in print and in video games. I used to think that one day I’d have a nice supplemental income from my typefaces but the reality of the situation is that people like you don’t value the effort that goes into making a typeface. I haven’t designed a new typeface in eight years now and I have no desire to do so. Why should I when you’re going to be a big bitching twat you greedy self-centered tantrum throwing teenager?
Fuck the foundries? You and others who haven’t paid for the typefaces you use have been fucking the foundries for years.
Fuck the foundries? Fuck you.
Is it a licensing issue worth caring about? It’s up to the css author to make sure they have the appropriate license for any css they include. Same goes for any image, or linked download. It’s up to the author. I don’t think that’s any concern for browsers or working groups. It’s an issue for web designers and companies with websites.
I don’t see why the web should avoid the technology. If designers use fonts in ways they aren’t legally able to… that’s the designers problem. Harsh? Maybe, but that’s reality. Misuse isn’t a reason to not implement an API (which is what @font-face really is). It’s up to the designers to use it in ways that are legal.
I think ultimately that @font-face may help kill the insanely priced fonts by making the font space more competitive. Websites will want fonts that look more original. There’s more demand, which encourages more competition.
Right now 99.9% of fonts (if not 100%) are purchased by graphical designers. No normal home user buys fonts. It’s a professional purchase. By opening Fonts up to the web, you’ve added an even larger group of buyers.
We’ll still see some holdouts, but the more affordable fonts will become the popular ones, hence the ones people see and use themselves.
Most people don’t know Helvetica rules the world… they just know it’s ubiquitous so they use it. Same goes for the fonts that are licensed appropriately.
Same market with iPhone apps. The popular apps are generally < $3 or free. It’s what people gravitate towards, what people buzz about, what people see, and what makes the most popular list.
I guess I just don’t see the difference from or
Damn… my commented… your blog engine eated it.
I guess I just don’t see the difference from [a href="*.zip"/] or [img src="copyrighted.jpg"/]
@Chris
That remind me lot of discussion with graphic designers
that claim that fonts are expensive like hell, i cannot
imagine them working years for a project with such a low income.
Thats why i said instead of making progress on daily market
we just keep and keep reinvent the wheel.
Graphic designers are exhanging fonts like changing t-shirts
that eventually fuckin up the market. Isn’t normal people be more hesitate?
— Anonymous
prevention of copies is not a sustainable business model.
copyright is dead. people just aren’t used to it yet. the issue is not about “right” or “wrong” or protecting your work, it is about the simple reality that copying information is free, be it a font or an mp3. napster happened. bittorrent happened, youtube happened, etc.
copying is not theft. it is replication. evolution likes replication and mutation. you can’t stop digital replication. so, given this fact of life, what is your funding model? it’s probably something like work for hire, job by job. you can’t expect to spend a year in secret designing a typeface and then release it under DRM and expect revenue. probably you will get hired to produce a custom font for someone, then it exists for all. this is a major advantage to individuals over corporations. free distribution to the world is the most awesome thing an independent designer could ever want. the future is awesome, it will just take us a while to get through the rough transition spots.
You rock.
Sorry I have nothing constructive to add. Just… well said my good man!
— James
> my average yearly income off the typefaces is $115
Right. Because, at the end of the day, you draw letters. How much did you *think* people were going to pay for that? It’s not exactly adding value, is it? The foundries fucked themselves before anyone else could get a boot in, by choosing to base their income on idle doodles.
This may, of course, be incredibly ignorant and unfair of me. But so long as everyone agrees, that doesn’t matter one whit.
Interesting follow up also on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=572730
— Nick C
If fonts on websites are performances of copyrighted tunes, then perhaps content publishers can subscribe to them just like restaurants or radio stations.
— Chui
To Chris MacGregor
So you are a commercial font designer that hasn’t designed a font in eight years because it no longer pays? I feel for you man. I illuminate manuscripts, and the bottom has completely fallen out of the market, and it is everyone elses fault. All these people who are using Gutenberg’s printing press – that metal type – how can it possibly be as good as handcrafted type? People don’t notice the difference! That’s because they’re ignornant. They are just leeching off the backs of the manuscript illuminators – they even create metal type copies of our handwritten faces! Fuck them. Fuck them all!
— responder
While I agree with your sentiment, coming across as a four year old throwing a tantrum will win you fewer supporters than showing some humility.
By the way, the font on this site looks fucking horrible. If you aren’t willing to change it at least sort out the line spacing.
— Matt
>Right. Because, at the end of the day, you draw letters.
That remind me my grandfather that he thinks, since computer exist
all is done with one click. Yeah u so fuckin right. lol
@by choosing to base their income on idle doodles.
Cant call idle doodles something that you use, read, see, get informed, communicate at a daily basis, isn’t it?
— type.nasos
MicroType Express compresses fonts far better than TTF can–even when the TTF files are gzip -9′d. TTF cannot do it.
«Zeldman WANTS to be a customer. He WANTS to throw money at them. They’ve said no, consistently and unapologetically. So fuck them. They deserve what they get.»
*Every* *single* “intellectual schmoperty”-based industry is reacting – poorly – the same way to that Internet thing. The music industry, those interstellar morons, was forcing DRM on people who *wanted* to buy MP3 while they were selling non-encumbered CDs and while sharing sites were popping up and left and rights. It’s always been much easier to get mp3s illegally than legally, even if you have $∞. It’s like they want to be “pirated,” those coke-snorting, artist-robbing, fan-molesting assholes at the RIAA.
Next in line are the movie people, who are understanding only a *tiny* bit faster than the RIAA, but they had a bit of a headstart due to the technology for downloading movies having lagged a few years behind that for sharing music (due to file sizes, obviously). They still insist on craptacular DRM though.
Next is the book industry. Same shit, different asshole. DRM. What can I say. Just like the music & movie industry, they want you to pay almost as much, if not more for less; there are documented instances where non-transferrable, non-tangible, non-resellable Kindle ebooks are priced higher than their paper counterpart. Oh, and those assholes raise the price when there is more demand, as if there was a limited supply of bits. Fucking morons.
Foundries? What can I say, their reasoning is flawed beyond all the bozos I’ve just mentioned. They are fantasizing about a non-problem! Ok, let me spell it out for you M-O-R-O-N-S: if someone uses your font on his website without proper license … you can sue them! DMCA notices for fuck’s sake!
And what if a school boy “pirates” your preeeeecious little font to create his school report? Yeah, what if? Oh noes, the lost revenues! Morons, he would never buy your damn font anyway, and on top of that he can download your damn font *right now* on every single torrent site.
There’s only one industry that’s embraced sharing completely and with great success: the computer industry. Microsoft is holding up thanks to their criminal monopoly abuses; but Free/Open Source Software is creeping up everywhere, and bringing the gift of knowledge and freedom to the masses. It has killed the Encyclopedia business, not through baaad “piracy,” but through the power of cooperation and sharing: Wikipedia.
Anyway, DRM’d fonts will never exist for real, because you can’t put DRM in Free Software. Well, you can put it, but anyone can remove it easily by definition, so why bother. And I can say without much of a doubt that most web designers use Firefox & friends primarily.
— NM
I wrote what I think the business model for web fonts is here:
http://www.openfontlibrary.org/wiki/Embedded_OpenType#What_might_happen_in_the_future?
«MicroType Express compresses fonts far better than TTF can–even when the TTF files are gzip -9′d. TTF cannot do it.»
That’s awesome. It’s very important for files that change so often to be as compact as possible. I mean, wow, every time there’s a new version of Gill Sans Mono Ultra Bold, I don’t want to be wasting any of my 28Mbps connection to download yet another 90kB!
It’s so important that your technology can save me a dozen kB on that!
!!!
☺
— NM
Mark, I can’t blame you for venting. I feel the same way, and I design typefaces for a living. All of the type designers I know desperately want to find a way to enable people to use fonts online, and not just because we’re capitalist stooges, but because we live our lives online. I’m never as happy as when I’m working on our website, and that there’s no practical way to set it in a typeface of my own design is a very bitter irony. Anyway, I hope you’ll hang in there.
@Jonathan Hartley
Yes, that is incredibly ignorant of you. Try building a functioning civilization without the written word. I’m pretty sure printing with movable type is considered to be one of the most important inventions in history of mankind. Of course, designing types wont make you rich. But most other noble professions wont either. And yes, it DOES add value. That’s why every corporation in the public realm shells out millions a year for those insignificant letters. Before you go referring to the practice as idle doodling, consider a world where every single letter-form you read was a blackletter or Times New Roman. And about all those people agreeing with you, type design may well be an insignificant practice to them, but if those people run a business that has to interface the public, they’d better get educated on the matter very quickly or risk losing out to the competition that knew of its value.
— Alex
The copyright status of typefaces is really weird. You can legally clone the look of a typeface if you don’t use the same bits to represent it. (No, you can’t just change the name.) A redrawn version of Gill Sans is legal but a redrawn version of Mickey Mouse isn’t. This is how MSFT got away with the bad Helvetica clone, “Arial” — http://www.ms-studio.com/articles.htm .
@bonaldi: “Case in point: newspapers.”
Want to know how to save newspapers? Make a better product that people actually want.
@Chris MacGregor: “I haven’t designed a new typeface in eight years now and I have no desire to do so.”
Well then, I guess you don’t have a dog in this fight and can safely be labeled a disinterested observer…
@Chris MacGregor: “Why should I when you’re going to be a big bitching twat you greedy self-centered tantrum throwing teenager?”
This is my new favorite sentence. Do you mind if I have it printed on shirts?
That was a pretty unpleasant way of getting your point across. Drives me nuts how everyone on the internet thinks they’re some kind of freedom fighter because whatever they happen to want at the moment is some god-given right.
— Chris B.
**emailed**
Sirs,
I was on the verge of making a purchase when I noticed that the terms of the license is for 1 CPU @ 1 Location.
We have a quad-core computer, which has 4 cpu’s and acts as a server. No one actually uses it, all data is managed on it remotely. The fonts would be installed on this server and used by several applications that reside on this server.
Myself and 5 other members of the staff also happen to remotely access that computer using laptops from various global locations. Although we access the server from remote locations and can use all the applications, none of the actual data or software actually reside on our laptops.
Exactly which license should I purchase?
–
Edward McCain
@Chris MacGregor: As the cost of duplicating bits approaches zero, people become increasingly insensitive about the true costs of their actions. It’s likely too late to start charging for something people can easily obtain for free. When Radiohead gave away their latest album to anyone that would fill out a survey form, people still downloaded millions of copies from BT because they couldn’t be bothered to spend the two minutes, or perhaps like me just didn’t want to. We find ourselves in a situation where smart, young independent bands are realizing that they are now selling an image; their recorded output is just a loss leader to get fans in the door.
My overwhelming reaction to your plight — making $115 in a year, not doing what you love in 8 years — is pity. Not “oh man, dude is getting way screwed!” pity, but the kind of pity you feel when you see a someone that could be helped pissing themselves in a doorway. You’ve got some of the smartest minds of our generation ready and willing to help you — FREE — and you can’t even bring yourself to admit defeat. It’s over: your $115 is not worth punishing the entire web for.
You might be an example of the most selfish class on the planet. Bravo! That’s an exceptional accomplishment.
For everyone else, what I don’t get is why we’re letting these shitheads win through our own inaction. If we raised a few million dollars, we could hire a team of top-notch font artists to create a new suite of fonts of the highest calibre and release them under whatever IP-free license seems appropriate. You might chortle at my casual “few million” comment, but there are likely people reading this (hello Paul Graham) that could literally cut a cheque and change the entire course of web history without having to call their bank manager and release a hold.
Save you, Chris? Somebody save the other (100% – 1000) of us.
Very nice. I’ve been using open source fonts for a couple years and won’t ever look back. Thanks for pointing out this problem.
-Brad
— Brad
Commenters have compared fonts to stock images; stock image companies put watermarks on their images so you can’t just use them without paying. Yes, you can remove the watermark, with a lot of work, but for people (or businesses) with income, it’s cheaper not to, and for people with hours to spend to save a dollar, they wouldn’t have paid anyway.
To whoever said fonts are not copyrightable in the US, (1) typefaces aren’t, but fonts are a different matter, and (2) better make sure you don’t serve the fonts to anyone outside the US if the design is not by an American citizen residing in the US! The US does have reciprocal copyright agreements with other countries these days.
Regarding EOT being a proprietary tool and MicroType Express being patented, if they were part of a W3C Recommendation you’d see open source tools too.
Mark, if you want to fuck the type designers I can introduce you to some really sexy ones. If you are happy with low-quality mp3 files maybe you’d be OK with bitmap fonts in any case? After all, print is obsolete, and 75dpi screens are good enough for most people, right?
I think (more seriously) what the type industry (including Monotype/Linotype/ITC, Adobe, Microsoft Type, Bitstream, as well as numerous small foundries) is asking is that “Web fonts” not simply work unchanged on the desktop, and indeed be labeled by domain, so that people who copy them do so knowingly. It’s obviously going to be easy to copy them deliberately, but that’s not really the issue. It’s not about shuffling little pieces of metal around, there’s no (well almost no) feeling that somehow fonts can be made “secure” – after all, open source Web browsers have to use the font to display text.
I think there’s fear in some quarters that this constitutes something called “DRM”, although it’s hard to pin people down as to what they mean exactly. Usually (not always) it’s a synonym for “FUD”, but I think the fear is that a Web browser could be defined as a device for breaking copyright protection. The answer here (I think) has to be that the “Web Fonts” format isn’t actually a device to prevent copying, but rather a device to help people know where the font came from and to keep it with its license. But I don’t have enough of a legal background to be sure that would work, and in any case courts get to decide, not lawyers or programmers or standards wonks.
You don’t have to stick to images with “alamy.com” or “shutterstock” written all over them, or to 120-pixel previews, on the Web, because there are free (0$) images, and also (much less often) because people license non-free images for the Web. However, images are visible: people know you’ve got a photo there, or a Mandelbrot fractal, or whatever. Fonts are invisible in use: the glyphs are visible, but the point in most cases of using type is that the reader doesn’t think about it directly, but reads the text. So a better analogy isn’t with images or even music, but perhaps sound samples that musicians use, or PhotoShop brushes (often distributed in encryted zip files so you have to ask for the pasword, and then pay to get it).
As a typographer I’ve wanted downloadable fonts on the Web since 1993 when Mosaic came out (I never used the NeXT Web client, and the linemode one worked in a terminal). And yes, http://www.openfontlibrary.org is (we hope) going to be a fabulous resource, but that doesn’t mean I don’t value the commercially-produced fonts. I’m willing to run commercially-produced software, too, at times, without demanding the source code :-)
Disclaimer: I was at the W3C web fonts meeting in France, and I work full-time for the W3C; if I have a vested interest beyond wanting to push Web typography forward, it’s that I want to see consensus and agreement.
Liam
“Want to know how to save newspapers? Make a better product that people actually want.”
Either you didn’t understand the analogy, or you think that high-quality full-spec fonts aren’t a “better product” that people want.
Because the point, the one that’s being missed by many of the comments here cheering about the new world of costless duplication, is that the consequences of this are lose-lose. I suspect people are too used to justifying copyright infringements with “it’s their fault their business model is broken”, “musicians will always want to make music”, “modern music is crap anyway” and “we’ve already got enough music to last us lifetimes” to see that these arguments don’t really apply to fonts.
In fact, this is an interesting variation on the how-do-digital-creators-earn-income problem, because it isn’t the same situation as CDs-are-replaced-by-MP3s-shit-what-do-we-sell-now that the music business faced. Fonts have already been digital for decades, despite what Mark thinks about “metal”. But if there’s no business model for online digital fonts, typographers will simply stop cutting new faces, and foundries will not release their existing ones. Which would be bad. It’s in the interests of designers who value good typography to help find a way that supports its creators.
Sure, Berlow’s idea is unworkable. He’s a typographer, not a coder. Is there really not a way we can come up with that allows font licensing to be respected or acknowledged, but doesn’t mean remodelling every app in the world? Back-of-a-fag packet thinking suggests some sort of mod_font plugin for Apache that would serve up only licensed fonts. Sure the end user could try and intercept them, but a patch for CS5 would cover most of the uses foundries are going to care about. This isn’t the music business, and these guys aren’t total idiots. The solution doesn’t need to be watertight, just “good enough”.
I’d much rather we worked on that, instead of throwing the rattle out of the pram. Because the alternative, like Mark admits, is playing a a tin drum and a kazoo and pretending it’s an orchestra.
— bonaldi
It’s been 19 years since I worked in the computer-font business, so perhaps I’m a disinterested observer by now. Actually what I am is torn. On the one hand, it is absolutely absurd that web browsers have been limited to a handful of fonts, chosen at various companies’ whims. On the other hand, type design is a beautiful and noble endeavor, one that’s been through a lot of rough times, and I hate to see its remaining business model about to get thrown out the window.
But really, my main reaction to this thread is how disgustingly rude many of the people in it are being. As a fellow geek / technologist I’m really embarrassed by the naive arrogance shown in too many of the comments. The fact that you know something about computers does not entitle you to talk wise about subjects you don’t know much about, or to ridicule people who are coming from a different perspective than your own.
Oh, and I have to add — Mark, you don’t need to apologize for using free fonts. It’s true that 99% of them are shit (as per Sturgeon’s Law), but there are a number of really excellent ones, some of which I use all the time. Just a few off the top of my head:
Gentium, Day Roman, Yanone Kaffeesatz, Yanone Tagesschrift, Delicious, Aller …
If the solution you propose to fix a hole in your business model is for the entire rest of the world to alter the way it works, you’re doomed.
very true, so if you want to only have free type for the rest of forever, you should care about foundries doing well also. or else you’re only going to get amateur type in the future.
One would think that people would have learned the expensive lesson that music and other media has had to endure due to it’s thick headed insistence in now obsolete business models.
But I guess not.
You could be pretty much ignoring joe user or joe business memo, and centering your efforts in providing ways that facilitate content creation by professional designers, which may still be where your money is. Keep your head stuck in the sand, antagonize people and you know where you will end.
— Anonymous
Sorry, when you use phrases like “epic fail” it undermines your entire article.
Interesting worldview these folks have:
“This is not merely because these formats guarantee the accuracy of output, it’s because fonts are software, and sharing software is illegal.”
(from http://www.typography.com/ask/faq.php?faqID=17#Faq_17 )
— Julian
Does anyone know of a code library– preferably in Python or C– which can be used to programatically inspect features of font files? This seems as good a place to ask as any.
— Jeremy Dunck
Given Mark’s terrible choice of fonts for use on this website, I would actually support reducing the allowed font options on the Internet, just so no one can even hurt my eyes like that.
Seriously, the type inside the blockquote is ugly at best, and almost illegible at worst. I won’t even mention the atrocious jaggedness when it’s bolder and bigger (like in the h3 elements).
— Aram
@Pete Forde
“The most selfish class on the planet? Really pete?
Was it selfish for Chris to dedicate his many weeks and months of work for such a small return? I guess that my definition of selfish is a bit different than yours.
You won’t understand until you walk a mile in Chris’s shoes. And your pity is misplaced.
The real pity is that he didn’t stick with it. He did some great stuff. There is no way to tell what value the world has lost because “the economics weren’t in it” – Not just for Chris, but for every aspiring type designer that quit because it pays more to deliver pizza than “draw letters”.
I have to agree with Chris. Foundries have been getting fucked for years. I used to make fonts as well, and similarly gave it up. I also used to do freelance work with agencies. When I would come in to work in their shops, I would find my fonts pirated on their machines all the time. The hate builds in you… Just put yourself in our shoes. Some of my designs have taken months of effort to build and people trade my fonts like baseball cards and then turn around a charge a client for them and tell me that my work should be “free”
A lot of Type designers that I know are pissed off or full of hate. It’s hard not to be. I find it interesting that the social news world rallied around that designer that lied about being billed $18,000 for stolen logos but that Type designers who have no rights and can’t make a dime to do what they love get nothing but smack. (“Fuck the foundries”)
I figure type designers sell one copy in five thousand that sit on some user’s machine. When your business has that kind of problem, I’ll listen to your good advice as one of the smartest people in the world. Until then, I don’t think that much of what you or many of the others here have to say is a little mean spirited.
As others have noted this argument is being had about many types of works.
I agree with Dan Paluska “copyright is dead. people just aren’t used to it yet”. You either figure out the new revenue model or watch someone else do it.
@ Tim Alphonse “Sorry, when you use phrases like “epic fail” it undermines your entire article.”. So basically you fear all change and would prefer we use the Kings English?
@Paul Hunt. You know I would really rather have “amateur type in the future.” There are plenty of talented amateurs out there and I have been using their fonts for years.
Newspapers are failing for the same failure to adapt. They lost national advertising to Google. They consistently overcharged local advertisers like me who really have no way to advertise to the local customers I need for my brick and mortar.
Newspapers could service their market with the best local news coverage in depth if they wanted to survive. I would buy it everyday and advertise as well. I buy it occasionally when I crave a paper to read with my morning coffee, and it’s just so so disappointing.
— Dan
I hope they DRM the font used for their website so I don’t have to read it.
«I think there’s fear in some quarters that this constitutes something called “DRM”, although it’s hard to pin people down as to what they mean exactly. Usually (not always) it’s a synonym for “FUD”,»
You’re describing a scheme to manage licence rights digitally. Manage … Rights … Digitally … Yeah, that spells “FUD”, riiight.
(You’re working under the assumption that DRM means obfuscation; it’s not necessarily so.)
— NM
Here’s an interesting bit: In the link to Tal Lemming’s site, he has this bullet point:
There should be a new file extension for this. I propose “.wtf” – “WebType Font”.Tal Lemming
I think that about sums it up.
@Dan Gayle,
I thought that was great as well.
«The fact that you know something about computers does not entitle you to talk wise about subjects you don’t know much about, or to ridicule people who are coming from a different perspective than your own.»
Oh please. There are two kinds of people, those who think DRM is a good idea, and those who have a fucking CLUE. We know history. We’ve seen, as I’ve explained at length, DRM fail for video games, music, movies and ebooks, and we’re supposed to “keep an open mind” or something about DRM for fonts? Really? No, really?
— NM
«Regarding EOT being a proprietary tool and MicroType Express being patented, if they were part of a W3C Recommendation you’d see open source tools too.»
And why would, say, Firefox implement a patent-encumbered standard (unless there’s a clear, free license to use it, obviously)? You might work at the W3C but you appear to be missing a few bits of data about F/OSS. For instance, even Google / Apple could not get an exclusive license for use with resp. Chrome / Safari. Due to LGPL code originating from KHTML, they have a duty to provide every single recipient of it with a right to that patent, or cease distribution.
— NM
And why would, say, Firefox implement a patent-encumbered standard (unless there’s a clear, free license to use it, obviously)?
For the same reason they’d implemented the patent-encumbered <canvas> standard – the W3C has a patent policy that attempts to ensure there’s a clear, free license to use any patents that are required for implementing their Recommendations.
— Philip Taylor
“Drives me nuts how everyone on the internet thinks they’re some kind of freedom fighter because whatever they happen to want at the moment is some god-given right.”
No, you people are the ones who believe they got a god-given right to a job no matter how the society moves. You don’t care for the people who were put out of job after the creation of the gutenberg press, do you ?
I don’t copy fonts but I only use free ones. I don’t care for the crybabies designers who come here to cry and spit their hate on society. If your job became worthless, learn a new one, idiot, because if there ever was someone who believed in God-Given rights, it’s you. There is no god given right to a job for your whole life until you retire. There is no such a thing as a job for ever.
— Fuckyeah
If we’re going to swear, how about fuck off yourself. I’m a software developer, not a type designer, but I’m actually getting bored, sick and tired of the whole immature way that the software industry is swinging it’s big dick around, determining the working conditions for type designers, musicians, photographers, journalists, and anyone else whose content gets in the way of making OUR lives easier: You give us your stuff for free, or, Fuck You, we’ll take it any way.
Better still, let’s dress it up in a philosophy where this is presented as LIBERATION from CAPITALIST PIGS, not one where the IT industry are the new pigs. And of course pigs get privileges other animals don’t. (For starters, they get to put the actual important bits of their intellectual property on a well-protected server)
As for the final comment – absolutely hilarious. I just love this admixture of rebellious rhetoric, combined with Thatcherite/Reaganite economists. It’s the new rebellion – Fuck you, you won’t do what I tell you.
— JulesLt
If Type ‘Designers’ think they can spend weeks struggling over the nuances of a ‘g’ and then expect people to jump through agreements and DRMs in order to use that font in order to generate a sustainable income they will find themselves very much mistaken. There are perfectly acceptable web fonts out there which can be used instead – people will just use those.
The moment you put the word ‘Designer’ into a job title it seems to transport the individual into some sort of visual enforcement officer. Literature designers just do glorified colouring in. Box designers make boxes, type designers tweak letters – nothing more. The end user really could give a toss.
— Graphic Design Suffolk
I’m optimistic that once the deployment platforms are out there, some foundries (I expect small ones first) will sell people what they want. That is, sell font use rights that allow the licensee to serve the .ttf or .otf file on an HTTP server for use in connection with Web content (or reference a font served by the foundry with the right CORS headers).
There is going to be demand. Not taking some money for this scenario means that the demand will be met by free fonts only.
I’m the kind of guy who bought a font just to get the right font for a logo in a one-time PDF/print publication (my master’s thesis), but the license allowed me to embed the font in a PDF and to render the font on paper. I’m not going to pay for a font if the license doesn’t allow my use case. Hence, I’m using Free as in Freedom fonts on my site.
Mark, when are you going to replace Gill Sans with a Free as in Freedom font?
Technical points:
.otf is smaller than the .ttf for the same font from FontForge at least. That is, you can get some “compression” by using PostScript outlines instead of TrueType outlines. This way, you can also avoid the ugly TrueType rasterization on Windows.
These days, hinting is not a benefit. It’s an annoyance. A properly anti-aliasing rasterizer such as the one Apple ships or FreeType with hinting set to off or little makes fonts look much better than ClearType or FreeType with hinting set to full. Unfortunately, users will have rasterizers with hinting, so publishers will need fonts that don’t suck with those rasterizers. Expect to see sites that look great on Mac and totally ugly on Windows.
‘Graphic’ designers that doesnt understand the value and the power of type… thats sad
ah and type designers struggling on those nuances, so type to be perfect and unique
and readable, and and and and so ‘graphic designers’ and not only ofcourse, to add
a personality and serve a purpose in communication in your projects.
— -type.nasos
Apparently, I’m soooo not the audience for this. I’ve only been programming for 20 years, and I literally could not care less about fonts. I guess graphic designers really really want this. I’m sure they’d be really passionate about wit, but I just look over at my bookshelf of paperback books and think, they are letters. They are used to form words and sentences to convey ideas. Who the hell cares what font they use? Would what you’re reading now change in any way if the font was ‘better’? Blerg. Talk about a tempest in a teapot. And, I think I speak for the majority of the planet. We don’t care whether fonts are downloadable or not.
— Richard
For the foundries they do not need drm to protect their fonts. To use a font your CSS file points to the location of the font file. All the foundries need to do is scan the web checking all font files to confirm that the web site is registered (has paid) to use their font. If not then the usual legal route can be taken. Even renamed and tweaked font files should be able to be spotted (Getty manage to do this with their images successfully enough). This way if you want a ‘professional’ font you can pay and use it, or go the open source route.
Just a quick clarification: no one here wants to steal your fonts.
What we want to do is *buy* your fonts, and you won’t let us! You get the “Fuck You” because you won’t take our money, not because we can’t steal your stuff. It’s been established that we can steal your stuff anyway, and apparently designers have been doing so for decades. But I don’t want to rip people off so I, and I guess everyone here, is going to start doing one of these four things, as soon as the browsers support this:
* use open source fonts (not paying for, just using and maybe contributing in some small way)
* using free fonts from amateurs (still not paying)
* making our own fonts (no money for you)
* buying, yes buying, fonts from any talented freelance designer that has the balls to actually sell them with a sensible license that allow use with @font-face (still no money for foundries that are in too big of a huff to actually take our money)
That’s four things we want to do, because we like nice fonts too. One actually provides money to type designers and at least two give you a chance at fame, for whatever that’s worth. You get the second big “Fuck You” because you want to prevent all of these things happening. Instead your going to hold your breath and stamp your feet until the world conforms to your wishes and puts DRM in every browser. We’re not prepared to sit around and wait till you get bored with that, and frankly don’t give a monkeys that your business model sucks. Get on the bus or get out of the way.
— dave
and really since when, we judge as a bad thing
people that protect their work oO
If officially they offer an alternative way,
a way to secure their work, licences will change.
until then use open source or web safe fonts.
Really cant see the problem here, we all want to
be able to use more typefaces in websites, as Hoefler said
its pity he cant use his own typefaces in his site.
Patience until there is a solution, what’s the big deal?
You cant screw a whole field, just coz u want it now!
— Anonymous
«For the same reason they’d implemented the patent-encumbered standard – the W3C has a patent policy that attempts to ensure there’s a clear, free license to use any patents that are required for implementing their Recommendations.»
wasn’t invented by the W3C, it was invented by WHATWG and first implemented by Apple in Safari, and shortly thereafter by Mozilla and Opera.
— NM
«As for the final comment – absolutely hilarious. I just love this admixture of rebellious rhetoric, combined with Thatcherite/Reaganite economists. It’s the new rebellion – Fuck you, you won’t do what I tell you.»
Oh yeah, RMS is such a shining example of a friedmanite, isn’t he?
— NM
What I don’t get is why font designers are different from any other type of graphic designers, who get a commission to make a design for someone and paid for it. Why do you feel like doing work that doesn’t pay? You are an artist that feels compelled to create? If you want to be, say, a photographic artist, fine, but you have to be pretty good and work really hard to have your photos sold. But it’s not your only option, you may also find work as technical photographer (police, hospitals), weddings, newspapers, magazines, ad agencies etc. Same with illustrators. Oh yeah, and musicians. How are font designers different? In other words: you want to be an artist, fine, but it’s always hard to be paid for that.
(I’m a working photographer and a musician with a few published CD’s and have worked as AD for a few years.)
— BetterLifeWithoutReligion
While I’m not a type designer, I am a software developer. As such, I can never understand why people don’t want to take money for their work. I’m constantly amazed at people like that- such as the music, movie, book, and now font industries. These people WANT to pay for your work. Lots and lots of people want to PAY your with REAL MONEY for your work. They like it and want to use it. Why wouldn’t anybody let them. “Hmmm, no I don’t want to make money for what I do. I’d rather just do it and watch them copy it for free.” How does that make sense? It boggles my mind.
I don’t understand why they just don’t allow a web license for the people who want to use fonts. Sure some people will copy it for free- BUT THEY DO THAT ALREADY! At least get SOME money- its better than NONE!
— Matt
<canvas> wasn’t invented by the W3C, it was invented by WHATWG and first implemented by Apple in Safari, and shortly thereafter by Mozilla and Opera.
It was originally invented and patented by Apple, and then standardised and extended in the WHATWG, and implemented by Mozilla and Opera, and then (much later) adopted by the W3C, and then (even later) Apple agreed to royalty-free licensing of the patent under the W3C patent policy. If the MicroType stuff was offered under the same patent licence, then it could similarly be used in open source browsers with no problem. (If it wasn’t offered royalty-free, then obviously it would be entirely unsuitable for a web standard, so I assume that’s not what Microsoft wants.)
— Philip Taylor
Nice use of Gill Sans!
— Jim
“While I agree with your sentiment, coming across as a four year old throwing a tantrum will win you fewer supporters than showing some humility.”
You must be new here.
Jonathan Hartley: The foundries fucked themselves before anyone else could get a boot in, by choosing to base their income on idle doodles.
This is grossly unfair to type designers. Flip through Knuth’s Digital Typography or some of Victor Gaultney’s papers. There honestly is a great deal of difficult and subtle work that separates usable type designs from truly great ones. I remember seeing Gentium for the first time, and being surprised at how much more pleasant it was to read than whatever I was used to reading in PDFs, even though I couldn’t tell you what was special about it.
Also, note that the results of the linked research are indeed in the form of free fonts. The time in question was subsidized by having time to work on academic projects and/or being supported/commissioned by a foundation (SIL International) to do the work.
Pete Forde: If we raised a few million dollars, we could hire a team of top-notch font artists to create a new suite of fonts of the highest calibre and release them under whatever IP-free license seems appropriate.
No millions required–there’s the already-mentioned Gentium, then there’s Charis SIL and Doulos SIL from the same foundry, Junicode, Linux Libertine, the Liberation and Droid families, and Computer Modern (or, more likely, its Type 1 version, Latin Modern). At least some of these are award-winning, professional-quality fonts. (And, darn it, I think Computer Modern is beautiful, though I seem to be alone in this.)
Jeremy Dunck: Does anyone know of a code library– preferably in Python or C– which can be used to programatically inspect features of font files? This seems as good a place to ask as any.
I’m reasonably sure you want FreeType. I don’t know exactly what you want to do with the fonts, but it’s pretty likely you can do it with FreeType.
@BetterLifeWithoutReligion
As a photographer, I understand that it takes a bit of time to go from shutter to framed print.
But you’re a complete n00b if you think that is anything near the amount of time that it takes to design a typeface. Some of the better ones, the ones that your favorite books/magazines/bibles/whatever were designed in took YEARS to design.
Feel free to work on whatever project you have for at least a year, a project that takes specialized knowledge that very few in the whole world have mastered, then have some a-hole come along and tell you that you’re supposed to give it away for free.
Take your best photograph, the one that you know will make your name famous around the world and that will grace the cover of every magazine and coffee table book, the one that you traveled long and hard to find and create, and give it away with no credit.
Only when you do that do you have the right to ask why type designers are concerned.
Old industry meets new technology, over and over and over. It’s never going to end. Like building a house on a beach and then trying to stop the beach from eroding, it’s just a matter of time before the house is underwater.
— Ryan
“I’m actually getting bored, sick and tired of the whole immature way that the software industry is swinging it’s big dick around, determining the working conditions for type designers, musicians, photographers, journalists, and anyone else whose content gets in the way of making OUR lives easier: You give us your stuff for free, or, Fuck You, we’ll take it any way.” — JulesLt
No, what we’re saying is: Let us give you money for your stuff so we can use it how we want.
It has taken ~10 years for the music industry to start to understand what their customers want and offer DRM-free MP3s to arrive for sale. That’s 10 years of training people who want to listen to music on their non-apple ipod that the easiest way to obtain it is file sharing – and 10 years of wasted potential revenue from all of those people who wanted to buy their music, but didn’t want to buy an entire album for the one track they wanted; who didn’t want to have to sit in front of their computer swapping CDs in and out for days on end. The music industry are only just starting to make money out of those people, because it has taken them 10 years to realise that because DRM-free MP3s are easy, they will win.
Web designers want to use a greater variety of fonts on their websites, but cannot use commercial fonts without breaking the license. We just want the font foundries to listen to what their users want, and embrace the web. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have had to tell my clients that there’s no way for them to use their corporate font on their website. Change licenses to a charge for creating content that uses a font, not distributing them for view, otherwise their market share will gradually be eroded by open source fonts and freelance developers who let their users do what they want. If font foundries want to make money out of us, they need to accept that DRM-free fonts are easy, so they will win.
Content creators – be it as music, video, text, image or font – need to realise that they will never “defeat piracy”. They need to adapt to the new reality of the internet: that bits are cheap, and that people will always copy their content without paying. What they have to do is come up with new ways to generate revenue from the people who have the money and are willing to pay. Don’t see every pirated file as a violation and a theft from your till; see it as a potential customer that you failed to convert into a sale.
— anon
@Aram As for Mark’s fonts, the site looks great on my Debian box, where I assume it defaults to the free sans-serif. On my Windows machine, however, the Gill Sans at 12pt is choppy and hard to read.
Fantastic article, it’s refreshing to see a proper rant. I see Kevin Yank criticising you on Sitepoint, what a little blonde haired pussy that guy is. Sometimes you have to dismantle all the politics and get right to the crux of the matter. The font “foundries” are going to go the same way as major record labels if they fail to adapt, people don’t learn from history.
tl;dr – Fuck the foundries.
— dc
Nothing needs to be “upgraded” to “respect” the permissions table I am proposing — no DRM here. I focus on the publishers end of the problem so/and becuase it is no one else’s. Don’t be surprised to learn that of those 300 fonts I made, your mom probably grew up reading them on the web (for free), trying to figure out how to raise you properly. I made the first generation of dynamic fonts possible for the web and am trying to move typography, not just a cascade of choices, onward in functionality, quality and performance. I mean no offense but have fun shuffling your little bits of html around!
Cheers!
— Mr.
@bonaldi: “Is there really not a way we can come up with that allows font licensing to be respected or acknowledged, but doesn’t mean remodelling every app in the world?” There is a way, but its not a technical way, as you are searching in vain for; its a business way. That is, there is a way to run a profitable business around fonts that are freely redistributable on the web. I know it, and I’m studying a Masters degree in type design at one of the best schools in the world to give it a shot. Mark said, “Dynamic web fonts are coming …. and that’s going to be a huge boon to somebody. I see you’ve decided that it won’t be you.” Well, its going to be me :-)
@Jeremy Dunck: “Does anyone know of a code library– preferably in Python or C– which can be used to programatically inspect features of font files? This seems as good a place to ask as any.” What kind of features? Tal Leming’s DEFCON can inspect OpenType features, FontForge is a C library with a python module interface that can do just about anything with fonts, and RoboFab is another python module that can do even more. And Pango can help tell you about Unicode coverage; Fontaine (on SourceForge) is a neat tool for such analysis.
— Dave Crossland
I agree entirely with all of this post. I’m the 100th commentator!
It would be nice if google perhaps hired a couple of type designers on work for hire contracts and produced 200 or so fonts and hosted them like they do with the javascript libraries. It would support the web, be legal, generate goodwill and I will still be a customer of adwords and adsense but with better fonts. A few quality designers pitching in would solve this problem. Heck I would even donate to an organization that would generate open source quality fonts for the masses.
— Eric C
On the one hand, I feel for the whiny font designers, who apparently toil away for years to produce something which is difficult to make a living with. On the other, who cares? If you choose engage in work that isn’t going to pay the bills, threatening people with licenses with dubious legal standing, that isn’t my problem.
If I were selling fonts, I would view having my fonts available for viewing on the web as a free billboard to those who care about such things. Whether that translates into licensing fees or professional services engagements, there are ways to make money.
— Brian Duffy
Wow. If you hadn’t dropped the F-bomb, I might not have known how intense you are about the subject. *sarcasm* Learn to write, man! If you want people to take you seriously you need to talk like an intelligent human being. It seems like you might have some rational thought behind this post, but it’s lost because you sound like an angry high school dropout. For a person like me who has put many hours into creating a solution to this problem (www.fontburner.com) your post is really insulting. Try contributing something rather than ranting about something you know so little about.
— Adrian3
Mark, do you actually care what people other than you think?
If you think that ugly, latin-1 only fonts are good enough, consider that other people may not agree with you. You can blather all you want about the restrictions that foundries want to put on font distribution, but in the end that’s not what it’s about.
You just don’t want to pay for the fonts.
If you offered a foundry or a type designer $10 Million dollars, I think you would find that they would be quite happy to give you the font and let you do whatever you wanted with it: no copy protection, free and clear. It would be a complete buy-out. How much have you offered?
Of course, you’ve offered the foundries nothing because you just don’t want to pay for fonts. You do not feel that the amount of value type designers place on their time and work is accurate, and you are angry that they have the gall to try to restrict how their work is used. You seem to forget that it is their work–not yours–and they have a choice of how to license their work.
The choice you have is to either negotiate or walk away. You have no right to demand how other people should do business, and your self-righteous tone is childish at best and disgusting at worst.
You want freely licensed open fonts? Well, you work at Google. Get them to hire a team of talented type designers and pay them a salary of $80K to $150K. This is about average for a software engineer at Google, no? It’s probably a mid-range salary for an extremely talented and experienced type designer creating work-for-hire. Have them work for two or three years doing research and developing the font, and then go ahead and release the font. Let’s say you hire 10 type designers. You are looking at an investment of around $4.5MM. Incidentally, even though that may seem like quite a few people, it is probably not enough to get full coverage on the CJK character sets, let alone other non-western languages. (Do you even care that there are people in the world who write in languages other than English? If it were up to you, would Google only support one language?)
Is $4.5MM too much money?
If you think it is, I’m not surprised. You just don’t want to pay for fonts.
Ultimately, you can rant and rave and curse all you want at people who create content. But when you look in the mirror tomorrow, remember this: you are just a cheapskate who doesn’t respect people or value their work.
— Anon
i’m totally with u. nevermind the h8rs (under the guise of constructive criticism) and the hear-no-evil squad. we’re all adults here; if someone doesn’t like ur guttermouth style, that someone(s) should click away. i’m over waiting on big business’ and corporate bs holding everything i do/want to do up. and i’m sick of being “professional” about it. looking forward to watching the foundry dinosaurs go extinct, still clutching their “property” in their cold, dead hands.
this is web. its purpose is to share.
I have “sinned” in the past and used fonts I didn’t pay for. I was young and naive. I now regularly pay for fonts because it’s the right thing to do. I wish more people in our profession would see the value in a well-designed typeface/font.
I want to use non-standard fonts on the web. I would consider paying MORE for a font if I would be allowed to use it online. I would license font(s) on a per site basis, if need be. I would willingly provide foundries with URLs where their typefaces would be used. I accept responsibility for making sure the font file(s) were not easily accessible and/or downloadable. I’d like to think other web designers/developers would as well…
Obviously there are people that will continue to pirate fonts, software, etc… But let’s face it, that’s not money the foundries – or software companies – are losing. Those people don’t value that which they share/steal, and are unlikely to buy anyhow.
It’s a crazy idea, but if you empower your customer and maybe they’ll buy more.
He he… the poor capitalist bastards are sad that their sand castles are being swept away by a sea of social change. Sorry, but artificial scarcity will no longer be tolerated.
I develop open source software. I’ve spent years working on my projects and I’m more than glad to make them available to every person on the planet. I use them to produce commercial products and so can you. Why are you artsy fartsy types so selfish? Are you really so poor? So desperate for attention?
I develop open source software. I’ve spent years working on my projects.
Let me understand smth, u mean u are working on years for projects
with noone pay you? Im sorry but u cant understand that type design
is a job, and im gonna let you down here, but really sorry when my daughter gonna ask new shoes, i won’t look at her and say “sorry hun, i work for free now, go outside eat mud”
how u expect people to live if they work for free? web designers work free? oO
graphic designers work free oO? fashion designers work free oO? photographers work free oO? i wont analyze academic, this thread, said almost anything in that… not to mention that 90% of type designers are helping free through communities and projects on their free time. Its their work, its theie rules. Deal with it!!!
— -type.nasos
@Zeitgeist: Actually, I’m also a software engineer, not a type designer. Interesting that you would make your assumptions.
If marginal and reproduction costs are zero, how should people make money? Do you make money from providing support from your products? Do you think that would work for fonts or photos? Not all industries are the same….
Incidentally, Mark, feel free to chime in. You are obviously an expert in typography and business, so let us know how font designers should be making a living.
— Anon
“Incidentally, Mark, feel free to chime in. You are obviously an expert in typography and business, so let us know how font designers should be making a living.”
It’s not his job to give you a business model or else he’d be running your business for you.
If anyone has been paying attention these last 10 years to the evolution of the Internet you’d notice that in a choice between Great vs Crappy the Crappy solution will win if the Crappy solution is cheaper, easier and less restrictive.
But keep crying… maybe a glassful of those sweet tears will help you swallow the truth.
— AnonJerkWad
Hey, Andy Rutledge made a post at uxmag.com with a similar attitude (http://www.uxmag.com/design/77/hungy-want-another-bullshit-sandwich). Read up on how that worked out for him. By the way, Gill Sans looks like shit on this site, and I’m on a Mac.
— Argle
@Anon (and others like him). This is exactly what is going wrong, the idea that designers and foundries have that releasing fonts on the web can only be done if they’re all “free” (of price, I guess). Unless someone implements some sort of magical solution that makes sure you get a dollar every time someone reads something in your font. The point of the article(AIUI, but apparently people seem to differ wildly on it) is that we will never give you that kind of power over our systems, so find another solution.
In the meantime, just selling web licenses and going after infringers with lawyers is probably the best substitute.
Especially the guy that found his font files illegally copied on some client’s computers. Turn around and sue the living daylights out of them. How spineless can you get?
— abc
@AnonJerkWad: “It’s not his job to give you a business model or else he’d be running your business for you.”
Mark is complaining that “he can’t use” the fonts produced by other people because they won’t license them to him. And it’s not true: they will license the fonts to him, he just doesn’t want to pay what they are asking. Again, Mark is asking for an unlimited royalty-free licenses for fonts. He doesn’t want to put it that way, because you can put a price on that kind of license. It’s a cost he doesn’t want to pay.
Again, he can rant and rave about how terrible the foundries are acting, but it comes down to the fact that he is just plain angry that foundries and designers value their work more highly than he thinks they should. Generally, in business, if one party thinks a price is too high, it’s up to the other party to make a counter-offer. Mark’s not doing this right now: he is literally cursing at the foundries and walking away. He’s not offering any kind of realistic option. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to ask for his solution since he feels that foundries have an unreasonable business model.
@abc: “This is exactly what is going wrong, the idea that designers and foundries have that releasing fonts on the web can only be done if they’re all ‘free’ (of price, I guess).” Interestingly, by law in the United States, I can make a printout of a font family, blow it up, trace it, create a new implementation, and sell it myself. This is totally legal–the design of the font cannot be copyrighted, only the actual implementation. Font designers know this all too well–the fact is, the only way they make money is by not releasing their “source code.” Once they release their source to someone else, there is no way for them to prevent a third party from making a new copy of the font. And that third party doesn’t even need to make a black box implementation, like in the software world.
I’m sure there would be more type designers creating open and free fonts if you could figure out a way to compensate the designers fairly. I wasn’t joking about having Google hire a team of designers to create fonts. How do you think Microsoft created their suite of web fonts? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web Microsoft did not release them royalty-free and eventually pulled them due to too many people using them without a license.
— Anon
“Mark is complaining that “he can’t use” the fonts produced by other people because they won’t license them to him. And it’s not true: they will license the fonts to him, he just doesn’t want to pay what they are asking. Again, Mark is asking for an unlimited royalty-free licenses for fonts. He doesn’t want to put it that way, because you can put a price on that kind of license. It’s a cost he doesn’t want to pay.”
So you’re saying that Mark, and tens of thousands of web designers like him, can’t afford an unlimited royalty-free license for a font to use on their website, because it’s too expensive – and so he’s in the wrong? Of course he’s not – damned right it’s too expensive.
I can buy a license to use a font in a printed document for ~$100 which I can then show to as many people as I want, but as soon as I want to use it for exactly the same purpose online, that price (a) is not published on font foundry sites and (b) is going to be impossibly expensive to justify the payment.
You’re *totally* missing the point. We want to use your fonts. We want to give you money. Only you’re clutching onto your old business model grounded in the world of print, where nobody can afford to use your font. That will only have one effect: nobody will. And as the world of print continues to shrink, your income will continue to shrink. People who don’t care about copyright will pirate your font anyway. People who do care about it will look for free alternatives, because that’s the only practical option left to them.
If you started selling reasonably-priced (ie $100) licenses for use on a website, people will start buying from you. If you see a website using your font, ask to see their license; if they can’t show it, feel free to sue them until they bleed. Where’s the problem here?
Trying to get every browser implementation to adopt a DRM scheme is stupid, because just like every DRM scheme before it, it will fail for one simple reason; you’re thinking about yourself, not the consumer. Accept that the world moves on, embrace the new market that’s opening up in front of you, and make a fuckton of money.
— The Real Anon
“Mark, do you actually care what people other than you think?
If you think that ugly, latin-1 only fonts are good enough, consider that other people may not agree with you. You can blather all you want about the restrictions that foundries want to put on font distribution, but in the end that’s not what it’s about.
You just don’t want to pay for the fonts.”
I coudn’t agree more. It’s called “the cost of doing business” and paying for something of value. There seems to be this perception in the graphic design and web design world, that high-quality content should be free, or almost free, and if it isn’t…f-off. What I find amazing is that you are talking about making a design available to thousands, perhaps millions of viewers, so why shouldn’t you expect to pay a reasonable price for a custom product that took months or years to develop? You seem to put your own role on a pedastal, but don’t extend that view to others. What’s that about? If you want free, go ahead and design with free fonts. Who cares. As a professional you should appreciate the artistic talent and process of creating custom fonts – not to mention the value you pass along to your customers. If you’re not willing to ante-up for quality then you really couldn’t care about your customers either. Go play with your toys. Sorry, you’re an amateur. Epic fail.
— Aaron
@ JulesLt
What are you on about? The software industry declining to engineer their products to protect artificial scarcity is not them swinging their dicks around; it’s doing what engineering, common sense, and their customers demand. What other world should there or could there be?
Anyway, the free fonts will only keep getting better. Lots of wonderful stuff in the world is free.
— john
What I find amazing is that you are talking about making a design available to thousands, perhaps millions of viewers, so why shouldn’t you expect to pay a reasonable price
I don’t see where Mark says he is willing to pay a reasonable price for web fonts. I can buy a copy of, say, H&FJ’s Gotham for $200, typeset a book with it and print and distribute “thousands, perhaps millions” of copies. Why can’t I pay $200 or so and use that font on my web site?
— voyou
That should have been “Mark says he isn’t willing…” obviously.
— voyou
I love the drive-by commenters questioning Mark’s ethics, customer focus, and faith in free’s overlap with quality.
“Epic fail”, oh, sweet, sweet irony.
— Jeremy Dunck
A software developer walks into a bookstore and finds a book he wants. The book costs $100, which he thinks is an high price. He grumbles, but is still about to buy the book when he notices that it doesn’t even come with a royalty-free eBook version the he can publish on his website. What does the software developer do? If you’re Mark Pilgrim, you write on your website, “FUCK THE BOOKSTORES.” After all, haven’t bookstores realized that their business model is unsuccessful and that they should give Mark Pilgrim all of their books for free?
@The Real Anon: “I can buy a license to use a font in a printed document for ~$100 which I can then show to as many people as I want, but as soon as I want to use it for exactly the same purpose online, that price (a) is not published on font foundry sites and (b) is going to be impossibly expensive to justify the payment.”
Asking for a license to a font for a printed document is the equivalent of distributing OEM copies of a binary program. Asking for a license to a font for an online document is the equivalent of distributing the source code of a binary program.
You make an excellent point in (a) that the price is not published on font foundry sites. It’s not published because the rights you want are royalty-free rights to fonts; those rights are typically sold for much, much more than most people are willing to pay. If a font foundry offered fonts for unlimited online usage for $100,000, would you pay it?
Incidentally, for what it’s worth, if you buy a license to a font you can use it to make a raster image online. Of course, that’s not what you really want, is it?
You don’t make a good point in point (b). The fact is, there are people willing to pay large amounts of money for unlimited use of fonts. _You_ may not be able to justify the payment, but large publications can and do justify the payments in order to have a distinctive look and feel to their product. You may not agree with the justifications that large publications use. But at the end of the day they are willing to pay and you are not.
“If you started selling reasonably-priced (ie $100) licenses for use on a website, people will start buying from you.”
Actually, I won’t start selling licenses at all–I don’t design fonts; I write software.
“Reasonably-priced” is a subjective description. Should Microsoft start selling proprietary source code for $100 for whomever wants it? If they choose not to price their source code at that price, does that mean that Microsoft is unreasonable? (Some would say yes; hi RMS!) What if Microsoft chooses not to release source code at all, even though it is based on community work? (Microsoft is a strawman; feel free to substitute any large software company.)
“You’re *totally* missing the point. We want to use your fonts. We want to give you money. Only you’re clutching onto your old business model grounded in the world of print, where nobody can afford to use your font. ”
No, I understand your point; repeated assertions don’t mean that I don’t understand. I think you are missing my point. Small ethical designers do purchase font licenses at low prices. Publications do purchase font licenses for unlimited use at high prices. You want to use the fonts, but, as I said earlier, you just don’t want to pay for them. You can hem and haw about “clutching” onto an old business model, but the important point you seem to be missing is that it’s not everyone that can’t pay what people are asking, it’s _you_. And rather than making any kind of reasonable counter-proposal, you and Mark and others persist in making ad-hominem attacks against foundries and independent type vendors.
If I choose not to sell you my font for a price you are willing to pay, how does that justify telling me to “fuck off?”
“Accept that the world moves on, embrace the new market that’s opening up in front of you, and make a fuckton of money.”
So in your model, a type designer who spends several years of work on a font will charge $100 for giving the source code to anyone who has a web browser and a credit card. The source code to the font–the font itself–is then freely available in the entire world by anyone who visits your website. Why would anyone else pay $100 for the same font rather than just taking it? In the gaming world, _binary_ copies of a game typically start at $100 and only last at that price point for one year due to rampant illicit copying. How long do you think people would be willing to pay that price if the _source_ code were readily available?
I’m not objecting to online sales or trying to figure out a better way for typographers and other creative folks making money. The original post doesn’t address this problem–it simply castigates people for charging much more than what Mark is willing to pay or attempting to limit the distribution of their fonts.
“So you’re saying that Mark, and tens of thousands of web designers like him, can’t afford an unlimited royalty-free license for a font to use on their website, because it’s too expensive – and so he’s in the wrong? Of course he’s not – damned right it’s too expensive.”
How much should type designers charge? You say $100? I say if you can make a business model where fonts are sold for online usage for $100, then go for it. Find type designers who are willing to produce work-for-hire and hire them and then sell fonts for $100 a pop. Not willing to do the work? Can’t find someone who will sell their work at that price? That’s capitalism–you can’t force people to sell a product at the price you want. Given that situation, I don’t see how it is at all reasonable to then curse people who aren’t willing to sell their work for your absurdly low prices.
@Jeremy Dunk: “I love the drive-by commenters questioning Mark’s ethics, customer focus, and faith in free’s overlap with quality.”
I’m not sure if you are referring to me as a drive-by commentator. I don’t feel I’ve questioned his ethics, focus, or the ability to have free quality products. However, his post castigated an entire industry of people for their unwillingness to essentially give away their work on his terms with nothing in return. In addition, he offered no real mechanism in which they could make a living if they acceded to his demands for giving away their product. So I certainly questioned his maturity, frugality, and business sense. And honestly, I think those are legitimate criticisms that I’ve backed up.
— Anon
Here’s my half-baked suggestion for s way to licence fonts to individual web sites without requiring Mozilla Firefox to enforce DRM—which would be pointless since someone would immediately release a patch to drop the DRM support.
- Font foundry supplies a digitally signed licence in (say) XML + XML Signature. It includes the web site’s base URL (or domain and path, like cookies do).
- Pages using licenced fonts link to a copy of the licence file using the a LINK element with attribute REL=fontinfo
- Foundries spider the web looking for references to their fonts in the same way image libraries do, and can check they are licensed using the links. Unlicensed usage can result in automatically generated C&D notices.
- Honest web publishers can now pay to use custom fonts, and dishonest publishers run a risk of being sued.
The point here is that no special new technology is needed by the person using the fonts in their web pages—an extra link in their template is a lot less bother than running Microsoft’s Windows-only EOT-generating tool or whatever, and is compatible with dynamically generated content, which EOT was not. No browser support is required, which is good because you could not get it. The extra work is done by the foundries, the only entities with a financial stake in enforcing the licences.
As for whether I should pay £100 or £10000 to use a font on my personal web site is a matter for the market to decide.
“It’s not published because the rights you want are royalty-free rights to fonts; those rights are typically sold for much, much more than most people are willing to pay”
No, we want a license to use a font on our website that is comparable to what we’d have to pay if we wanted to produce something in print. Slap whatever you need onto the top to make youselves happy that we won’t be naughty, ie one domain per license, display a license ID on the site, report to a central licensing registry, whatever. Just make it affordable. You say that large organisations are able to afford the fees; good for them. However, the majority of small to medium businesses who want a brochure site can’t justify the kind of numbers you’re talking about. They will either not use your font, or find a free alternative: either way, it’s a lost sale.
“Why would anyone else pay $100 for the same font rather than just taking it?”
For the same reason people buy software and games and music: because it’s illegal, and they want to do the right thing. Not to mention that if they use a “stolen” font on their website, they open themselves up to being sued by the font designer, their client etc. Besides, people already use fonts they don’t have a license for to create bitmaps for their websites. There will always be people who pirate things, but there will also be people willing to pay a reasonable proportionate amount; a client simply won’t understand why they can pay $100 to use a font in their printed literature, but it costs significantly more to do so online.
“In the gaming world, _binary_ copies of a game typically start at $100 and only last at that price point for one year due to rampant illicit copying. How long do you think people would be willing to pay that price if the _source_ code were readily available?”
Don’t make me laugh! Seriously, I’m trying to eat here.
1: Game prices only last for a year because after a year nobody wants to buy it – they’ve completed it and traded it in for something newer and shinier, the one that their friends are all playing.
2: You’re making my point for me! Exactly how many games would be bought if the game publishers insisted on selling their games with a royalty free license because they’ll be copied by a section of their market?
3: Games employ DRM, but they still get pirated! It’s always going to happen. Accept the piracy and make money off the people who would pay.
4: The big difference between games and fonts is that games are bought for entertainment by individuals who have nothing to lose by pirating, whereas fonts are bought to reinforce a corporate image, by an organisation that will be relatively easy to track down, name and shame, and take to court.
I’m not saying that someone shouldn’t be compensated for their work, far from it. I’m sure it does take years to create a quality font, but whereas games have a short shelf life, a quality font will be desirable for a very long time, and will continue to bring in an income for many years.
The fact is that web technology isn’t compatible with current commercial typography licensing and license pricing. Just because the fonts can’t be protected from piracy isn’t a reason to price yourself out of the market. All the time font foundries stick their heads in the sand and resist the needs of the common commercial web designer, they are giving away their new potential market to the free competition, which will eventually develop to the point where their quality is such that the existing market starts to switch; at that point the foundries have lost their edge and will be forced to compete on an equal footing.
Across the industries you see people trying to hold on to their unsustainable business models, and resist the future instead of adopting to make the most of the new opportunities. It’s simple evolution: adapt, or be overtaken by something that is better-suited to the environment.
— The Real Anon
Across the industries you see people trying to hold on to their unsustainable business models,
Is the current (print-based) business model of the font foundries “unsustainable”? If so, why?
Perhaps you wish to argue that they are “leaving money on the table” by failing to expand into a new market of web fonts.
If so, you need to argue that
1) This market is indeed lucrative (and, sufficiently so that moving into it will outweigh the costs).
2) Moving into this new market will not hurt sales in their existing (proven to be lucrative) market.
Which poses a question (which I hope someone here can answer).
My understanding is that only the font source code is protected by copyright. Not the shapes. Anyone can produce a bitmap from a copyrighted font (or multiple bitmaps at multiple resolutions), and use that at will. The question then arises: why would any print customer ever pay a second license fee to the foundries? I presume you could purchase the font (with the cheapest license possible) and then make bitmaps from it, which you could use to your heart’s content.
Presumably, the answer is that there’s some EULA that prevents that.
If so, then a second question arises. If the font foundry gets into the web fonts business (with whatever terms imposed on the website author), what prevents visitors to the site from downloading the font (for which they have not agreed to any EULA), and creating the aforementioned bitmaps?
In other words, why would anyone ever purchase a print license ever again, if they could (perfectly legally, as I understand it), manufacture bitmaps of the font, obtained over the web?
When I was trying to clarify my thoughts on this, I ended up going back to a simple point: web browsers don’t enforce copyright restrictions for the countless other file types on the web, and I’ve not heard a compelling argument for fonts being a unique exception. I’m a web developer, and the client-side layer (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) of my work isn’t protected by DRM (there’s even a View Source feature to encourage snooping), yet no one I know would have it any other way.
So it’s perfectly reasonable and consistent for web browsers to allow DRM-free font embedding, and it’s up to the font foundries to adapt to this. If they choose to reject the new opportunities, pushing web developers towards free/indie fonts, then so be it.
“Is the current (print-based) business model of the font foundries “unsustainable”? If so, why?”
Because they’ve been unchallenged in the past; if you want a good font for your printed product, you need to go to a foundry – which is fine, like Mark said, their fonts are far superior to free fonts.
However, the internet changes the playing field. Foundries are currently up against free fonts which are mediocre at best, but as commercial web designers become aware of increased browser capabilities regarding fonts, they will want to use them. Free font producers will see the potential market, and improve the quality of their work, perhaps even selling them with reasonably-priced web licenses.
Then there will be a real alternative to font foundries. The web designers will then turn to their clients and say “Your house font is going to be $xx thousands because we need to buy a royalty-free license. The alternative is to use this cheaper alternative that’s not quite as good, but looks similar.” Perhaps a few large organisations will be able to pay the royalty-free license, but the majority will just go for the free option.
Then you’ll have your potential customers saying “Why should we pay $xx hundreds for a site license for this font, when we’re using this similar free one on our site?” Of course, the big corporations will still want their custom fonts, but we’re not talking about them. We’re talking about the small to medium sized businesses, who will go to a small to medium sized branding company, who in turn will move to quality free fonts. Everyone likes to save money, and when there’s a free alternative that’s good enough, they’ll move.
“Perhaps you wish to argue that they are “leaving money on the table” by failing to expand into a new market of web fonts. If so, you need to argue that 1) This market is indeed lucrative (and, sufficiently so that moving into it will outweigh the costs).”
Hundreds of millions of websites. At a guess, at least hundreds of thousands of professionally-designed websites for organisations, who would be potential customers for a font. Literal cost to the foundries to start selling web fonts to them: creating a new license, and changing their websites to let people buy under that alternative license. Or just change the existing licenses to allow print and web use.
“2) Moving into this new market will not hurt sales in their existing (proven to be lucrative) market.”
You raise an interesting point regarding bitmaps. I’m not a lawyer, but my guess is that it could be covered by licensing; for example, the website using the font would be licensed to give the visitor a free license to view any content on their website and only their website, and not for any other use.
But as has been said before, all discussion about illegal or immoral use of fonts is really just academic – embedding a font on your website doesn’t give visitors anything they couldn’t already find on BitTorrent. Anybody who is willing to pay for a font for print now will still be willing to pay for a font for print then.
The whole argument boils down to this: piracy happens, technologies and needs change; adapt your business model to make it easier for people to get exactly what they want, otherwise they’ll go somewhere else and you’ll lose a potential sale.
— The Real Anon
It’s kind of a shame that the recording industry doesn’t think like the font
industry. If it did, the big companies wouldn’t be selling music online for fear of being pirated, and a lot of independent musicians would be able to flourish in the vacuum.
But as has been said before, all discussion about illegal or immoral use of fonts is really just academic – embedding a font on your website doesn’t give visitors anything they couldn’t already find on BitTorrent. Anybody who is willing to pay for a font for print now will still be willing to pay for a font for print then.
Can we please, at least for the sake of discussion, distinguish between “illegal” and “immoral”?
Above and beyond the restrictions of copyright — I don’t see how there can be any legally-binding font-use license restrictions on the visitors to a website.
If (as I have understood), it is legal (under copyright law) to print off a font sample, scan it, and use the resulting bitmaps as one wishes, then I don’t buy your “people, who want to steal stuff, will steal it anyway” argument. What I have described is not stealing (in any legal sense).
But it clearly would undermine the font foundries’ print business. (Either that, or — which is perfectly possible — I have simply misunderstood how font licensing works, now.)
Moreover, I simply don’t buy your “their print business is doomed anyway” line. It is based on a long chain of hypotheticals, each of which is disputable. And, even if every one of those hypothetical were correct, it is still far from clear that embracing the web-fonts market would do anything to save the font foundries from the predicted demise of their print business.
“If (as I have understood), it is legal (under copyright law) to print off a font sample, scan it, and use the resulting bitmaps as one wishes, then I don’t buy your “people, who want to steal stuff, will steal it anyway” argument. What I have described is not stealing (in any legal sense).”
Ahh, sorry, I understand what you’re saying now – yeah, I can see how someone producing a corporate newsletter will trawl the internet to find a site with their corporate font, print the page out, scan it in, cut up each character and stitch them back together in the right order in photoshop. If we let the fonts get sent out along with web pages, I can see now how it’s totally different to downloading them from BitTorrent – the foundries would be totally screwed. I’ve been so stupid, font print license sales would dive – it would be fontageddon.
But you can’t seriously think that what you’re proposing would damage existing font sales? The people who buy font licenses at the moment are professionals and organisations who use legal versions of photoshop and word. If you’re in a position to care whether something is legal or not, you aren’t going to go to the ridiculous lengths of taking a screenshot of a webpage to get their fonts. People who bought print fonts in the past will continue to buy them in the future, and people who didn’t buy them will continue to get them from BitTorrent.
“But it clearly would undermine the font foundries’ print business … it is still far from clear that embracing the web-fonts market would do anything to save the font foundries from the predicted demise of their print business.”
Ok, we clearly disagree. Ignore the demise of the print business, that’s a distraction – although I never said it would die, just that it would shrink and the foundries would have to play catchup.
Let’s just leave it with the facts:
* The technology for delivering fonts is here and will be mainstream soon
* Web designers will want custom fonts to use in their websites
* Most clients who have paid for a print license won’t be able to afford a royalty-free license for the web
* Foundries can’t protect their fonts if they’re distributed through websites. DRM won’t prevent piracy; the only way is with a carrot and stick approach: offer an alternative, and back it up with litigation
* Unless foundries come up with a suitable alternative, web designers will either pirate the font, use a free/cheaper alternative, or stick with the web-safe fonts – none of which will bring the foundries any money
* We’re right at the beginning of this change, and if foundries move now, they can corner the market and squeeze out the cheap and free competition before it’s a threat.
Actually, on second thoughts, no. Foundries: keep doing what you’re doing.
Mark was right. If the foundries are unable to compare their situation to the music industry or the newspaper industry and notice the parallels, if they’re too short-sighted to realise that their marketplace is about to change, if they can’t see that they’re not offering what their customers need, then yes; fuck the foundries.
— The Real Anon
conversation started walkin on same circle.
The point i disagree, well its not actually disagreement but.
> Web designers need more quality pro fonts (custom font is different matter)
that lead us to web designers wait from the foundries to take some licence actions fast.
On the other hand type designers small foundries
>Type designers want to promote their fonts in web designers
But….. they wait until certain ye more secure solution wil be suggested
There are lot of discussion about that, lot of suggestion.. but the fact is that
as web designers, so theirselves are waiting …
i can easily keep it up like this so eveyone will say fuck you to a different direction.
Easy to blame smone ah?
really lot of staff have been said here, start see the whole project from all sides
not only from yours. Lot of problems to be solved.
— -type.nasos
“Type designers want to promote their fonts in web designers
But….. they wait until certain ye more secure solution wil be suggested” – type.nasos
That’s the point – by the very nature of the problem, there can’t be a secure solution. Because the font needs to be decoded by the browser by every visitor, any kind of DRM can and will be bypassed with ease. The only way you can do it is by licensing and litigating.
— The Real Anon
Ignore the demise of the print business, that’s a distraction
It’s not a distraction.
It’s rather central to your argument whether “People who bought print fonts in the past will continue to buy them in the future,” or, conversely, whether the font foundries are in imminent danger of going the way of “the music industry or the newspaper industry.”
There will, soon, be a market for web-fonts, where none really existed before. What’s not so clear is that the dollar size of that market will ever be comparable to that of the print-font market.
It’s rather telling that both Mark and most of the commenters here have focussed their remarks on the alternative posed by free fonts to fill that niche. What that indicates to me is a (perhaps unconscious) estimation on their part that the potential dollar size of that market is small.
The barriers to entry (aside, obviously, from the possession of a talent for font-design) to that market are low. And so one would think that, if there was serious money to be made, there would be plenty of eager new entrants into the market.
Instead, you’re telling me about how Real Soon Now, free fonts are going to be nearly as good as the commercial ones.
Striking, no?
The only way you can do it is by licensing and litigating.
That is the worst possible solution. You don’t actually make any money that way (though the lawyer do quite well). All you succeed in doing is pissing off your customers (and would-be customers).
Look how successful that strategy has been for the Recording Industry. You really think the font foundries want to go down that road?
Ye, agree, but ok… lets stop talking about money
this thread is beyond that, its not the point that
as type designer i won’t make huge bucks or OMG
i see huge market in web lets blindstep there, believe me
thats not the case. Type designers want a more clear path,
on top of all is their work, and thats smth you should all
pay some respect. As result and as nature of this work,
licences are their only weapon, unless if you ask here
ok lets screw all their business. Personally i dont care that
much for piracy because the people who will want a font,
a custom lettering, custom fonts, they know their way.
And just as you comparing this to music industry, you forget one fact
Last 5years the vinyl business have raised again at high levels. MP3?
CD? who cares… its quality that matters at the end.
-Cheers
— -type.nasos
“There will, soon, be a market for web-fonts, where none really existed before. What’s not so clear is that the dollar size of that market will ever be comparable to that of the print-font market.”
We’re talking about professional designers print designers and web designers, so the people who will be using web fonts will be the same people, or colleagues of the same people, who are currently using print fonts. It would stand to reason that the market would support a similar price per font per website. The market may not be as large as print fonts, or it may end up larger – but either way, it’s additional revenue for little or no work, and as I have explained before, with little increase in lost sales due to piracy due to the target audience.
“It’s rather telling that both Mark and most of the commenters here have focussed their remarks on the alternative posed by free fonts to fill that niche. What that indicates to me is a (perhaps unconscious) estimation on their part that the potential dollar size of that market is small.”
Read “free” as “free to use how you want once you’ve paid for it”. If people are talking about free-as-in-beer fonts, that’s because that’s the only option available at this stage.
“if there was serious money to be made, there would be plenty of eager new entrants into the market.”
If foundries don’t sort this out, there will be; once fonts in websites become mainstream, web designers will be screaming out for affordable fonts to use in their website. They don’t even have to be that great, just good enough, and people will step in to fill the void.
But as I have said before, once that happens the foundries then have to play catchup, competing on a playing field that has already been defined by amateurs and semi-pros. “Good enough” fonts are free now, and sooner or later reasonable quality fonts will be available for the web at prices that the market can afford, so it just seems to make sense for the foundries to get in at the ground level, set their own pricing and licensing rules to play by, and continue the dominance that they’ve enjoyed in print. If they don’t want to, then everybody loses out: they lose potential sales, and we’ll have to wait for the alternatives. As Mark so eloquently put it, “Your Fonts are superior to Our Fonts in every conceivable way, except one: WE CAN’T FUCKING USE THEM”
“Look how successful that strategy has been for the Recording Industry. You really think the font foundries want to go down that road?”
That was my point a while back – you need the carrot and stick. They only used the stick; they tried to sue people into submission without offering an alternative. For years I’ve wanted to buy DRM-free MP3s that I could play on whatever device I wanted, without it having to phone home to an authentication server that could be turned off, without me being limited to some arbitrary number of times I can copy it between my own machines. I just wanted to buy the music and use it how I wanted. It has taken what, at least 10 years for the recording industry to allow the likes of Amazon to start selling DRM-free MP3s. Only in that 10 years, their potential customers have gone off and found other means, namely piracy and paying – yes, paying – slightly dubious russian sites. People wanted to buy, but they couldn’t, so the recording industry not only lost out on 10 years of sales, but they lost the good will of their customers, which will have a far longer-reaching impact.
If you still disagree with what I’m saying, meet me in the middle, where my point is simply this: things are changing, and right now it looks like foundries aren’t interested. Unless their position changes, and changes to something realistic and practical (ie not loaded with flawed DRM that requires every browser to be updated), it can only ever cause us problems and lose them sales.
— The Real Anon
Your words “They still think they’re in the business of shuffling little bits of metal around” suggests foundries haven’t moved with the times. I’ll explain why they’ve gone backwards.
I do print with little bits of metal: letterpress printing. I see a guy locally who casts type. He charges, say, $55 for a fount of Bembo — a strange case of the metal form being cheaper than the digital form. He puts no restriction at all on what I can do with it … I can print posters, cards, I can even photograph it and put it on the web.
It seems that foundries have applied these restrictions well after they stopped selling metal type.
I’ll say that I think type designers should be paid for their work and it is a specialised task. Remember, though, that some of our most popular faces were re-drawn and developed eons ago. Monotype drew Bembo back in 1929…I doubt the original designer has seen much from recent purchases.
@Mark
“”"And this rant is my statement that I’m done trying. Real people — even professionals like Zeldman — have been trying to buy from these foundries for YEARS. Note the very bit I quoted: “I want to use your ITC Franklin in a site I’m designing.” Zeldman WANTS to be a customer. He WANTS to throw money at them. They’ve said no, consistently and unapologetically. So fuck them. They deserve what they get.”"”
What kind of messed up logic is this?
(a) Wanting to be a customer
and
(b) wanting to throw money at them
does not mean a thing, if they don’t want to deal under those *specific* terms and at that *specific* price.
Are you seriously arguing that they should not be able to set *their* terms and *their* price for *their* products?
It’s up to them to decide if not licensing their fonts for web use means losing money. Up to them, as in “not up to you”.
— foljs
“very true, so if you want to only have free type for the rest of forever, you should care about foundries doing well also. or else you’re only going to get amateur type in the future.”
All professionals were amateurs at some time. This means that amateurs learn and become better. I’d rather be left with a bunch of programmatic art I have the freedom to share and improve than a bunch of proprietors dictating terms and art to me.
This is one of the advantages that open source software (and in this case, fonts) have over those developed by companies. Companies need time to adapt their software/fonts licensing models and then distribute them, whereas free software allow you to do whatever you wish, thus not having to adapt at all.
Anon: Why would anyone else pay $100 for the same font rather than just taking it? In the gaming world, _binary_ copies of a game typically start at $100 and only last at that price point for one year due to rampant illicit copying.
No; that’s wrong, and I think it explains some of the problems here. Most software is piratable pretty quickly; if people are going to pirate it; they will. If they’re going to support the publishers; they will–even if it’s available online. Price points for new games clearly aren’t dropped in response to widespread illicit availability; if they were, they’d drop precipitously right after release.
How long do you think people would be willing to pay that price if the _source_ code were readily available?
Similarly, the entire Hoefler & Frere-Jones collection is available illegaly (it took me about thirty seconds to bring up a copy) already. So, clearly people are still willing to pay whatever price they pay to use it, even though the source code is available.
This is what Mark is trying to explain. You’re worried that people will use the fonts illegally. They’re already doing that. And splitting hairs between “they won’t sell them” and “they won’t sell them for any price short of astronomical” is flatly ridiculous. If the font owners price themselves out of the market, that’s their own damned problem; the problem is certainly not that every web designer in the world is trying to do something insane.
Jacques Distler: you need to argue that
1) This market is indeed lucrative (and, sufficiently so that moving into it will outweigh the costs).
2) Moving into this new market will not hurt sales in their existing (proven to be lucrative) market.
1) They’re currently making no money at all. Some money is greater than no money.
2) Whatever license they sell to web designers, it won’t allow all of the uses that an unlimited royalty-free license would. Unless most of the sales of these (incredibly expensive!) unlimited royalty-free licenses are to people who just want to use them for simple web design purposes, they’re not biting into their existing market.
Rogers Cadenhead: It’s kind of a shame that the recording industry doesn’t think like the font
industry. If it did, the big companies wouldn’t be selling music online for fear of being pirated, and a lot of independent musicians would be able to flourish in the vacuum.
No; this is completely wrong. The situation you describe was the case for several years, and we didn’t see indie music replace the major labels.
While free fonts are close enough to commercial fonts for most purposes, music is pretty much the opposite of fungible. Most people don’t want to listen to some random music; they want to listen to their favorite bands that they’ve heard on the radio.
I should also add that, while looking at beautiful typesetting, I came across a list of excellent free fonts. It’s old, but still quite useful.
‘Scuse my lack of fine technical knowledge, but what’s wrong with the Acrobat/Reader model? Make the fonts freely available for screen use (and maybe print output, recognising that so many people copy the fonts for that anyway) and just charge for fonts to be used for origination?
— peter
The interface of http://openfontlibrary.fontly.org/ is broken. The listing (“Get”) only shows one font while the “New uploads” section on the main page has five. So they could well have thousands of fonts but they’re just not accessible. And I couldn’t find an easy way to submit a bug, short of subscribing to a mailing list. Their openness has room for improvement.
— boblia
To Chris MacGregor
I just visited the web site you linked to in your name and unfortunately I saw a lot of stuff, but not your fonts. It would have made better business sense to link to a site with your fonts, as form of promotion and encourage people to donate you money if they have ever used your fonts. I can’t say whether it would make a difference, but at this point what do you have to lose?
Often you have to give up some control to get some control. This may sound odd, but it is the dilemma of the possible vs the impossible. Basically if you have a price point, or restrictions, that people can’t swallow, then they will opt for another less honourable manner of attaining the fonts. This means be trying total control, you ended up with no control. Also be sure to add a URL in the ‘about’ section of the font, to your site.
BTW As a favour, here is a link to your page: http://typeindex.com/ – hopefully it is the right one.
— Andre
looks like someone is trying to act as middleman in this very debate: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/
— david
Honestly, keep it up man. This argument needs polarizing opinions and a little adult language. If nobody sends a wake up, the Yours of the world will go under and the Ours won’t get the good shit. The web makes everything it touches free, see Chris Anderson. If the Yours thinks Our morals will keep up with the technology, then they’re more foolish than thinking they can enforce DRM on the WWW. The answer is in the ITunes business model, predictability and user experience will compel people to pay and submit to DRM willingly. A great place might be in getting involved with CSS browser extensions and have a good stake in CSS 3.1 or 4.0. Change the business model already foundries or go the way of Newspapers, playing catch up with no money to play. I feel like time is probably ticking on the window to innovate and get paid. I wonder WWCD. What would Chank do? Ha.
— Paddy
I forgot to mention the fact that web designers have seen their medium proliferate under the tyranny of web-safe fonts while print has been dying under the freedom, still the two have little to do with each other. The point I want to make is that more options will only make the web uglier and less understandable. If Georiga, Times, Arial, and Tahoma don’t cut it to express what you want, then seriously, what you’re expressing is probably bullshit. Open fonts on an open web will only make it easier to tell the hacks from the knowledgeable. Most of us are hacks.
— Paddy again
Obviously my earlier comment didn’t post, but I wanted to commend the author on a divisive post, much needed. The industry needs it, despite it’s complacency. Read Chris Anderson, who predicted the long tail. Everything is going free and if you want to survive on the WWW, then you need to focus on consistency and user experience. DRM obviously is not the answer, though it can be part of the equation. Look at the ITUNES money model and the money they make compared to others in the game. Make it easy for publishers to make money, users to spend it, and make money for yourself and shareholders. Fight the inevitable and become Zune or Rhapsody. You are easily replaced. Not the same industries, but learn the same lessons and stay alive. Personally, I don’t care if they fail, I’ll make money using Tahoma.
— Paddy
Yes. Fuck all foundries.
Except this one.
http://arkandis.tuxfamily.org/adffonts.html
— Alejandro Nova
You can strive to achieve security or usability, but not both in equal amounts. They’re mutually exclusive goals, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a bit of one and more of the other. Your choice.
— Andy
@Mark Pilgrim
Essentially right now type designers are scrambling to react to this very recent development and just trying to plot a sensible course through this, and this sort of polarizing article really doesn’t help things too much by using such tone/language. The points you make are valid and are of concern to all type designers: how to make a distribution model for fonts used on the web.
Think of it this way: a type designer would reasonably take issue with a magazine that licensed his/her typeface for print use and then bundled a CD with the magazine containing the raw .otf files …
Another issue is that the development of suitable typefaces for the screen — here I am talking about text typefaces for screen, not ones used for headers or big titles — is very expensive due to the very long process of optimizing a typeface through proper hinting.
Calling this DRM is immediately polarizing … when in fact many of the type designers just want to have a way of embedding some licencing details (like the domain a font was purchased for use on) Anyway, Tal Leming lays out many concerns in a very clear and level headed way on his site, and I recommend you read it: http://talleming.com/2009/04/21/web-fonts/
@The Real Anon
Yes there will likely be some fonts released soon that will fill the market with cheap goods of lower quality that will be allowed to be used online. This is something the type design industry has been dealing with for a long time now (since the move to digital type). There have been tons and tons of cheap fonts for free and for low price (just look at any free font site and some of the stuff on MyFonts). The main point is that there are many trained graphic designers that will license high quality fonts for print use (and often they will commission a custom made typeface for unlimited usage rights within an organization). There will always be people who will use cheap/free fonts, that’s fine, but the key thing type designers are now worrying about is how to (a) conceive of a good model that would cater to the sector of the market that do license high quality (print) fonts and (b) do it in a way that doesn’t require a mass reorganization of software or font-face (like the Microsoft EOT proposal).
A lot of type designers I’ve spoken to about this just want to have an embedded license (with the domain the typeface was bought for), most software ships with an embedded license agreement, websites have copyright/usage rights in code somewhere (this website has a nice little line indicating “/*dive into minimalism(c)2008 Mark Pilgrim,MIT-licensed including graphics*/”) In many ways, some embedded license information could just be an easy way to indicate that you did pay for the right to use the font software. Some type designers are calling for a bit more security, but there are many proposals right now since this discussion will be ongoing for the foreseeable future.
I would be happy with font-face using raw font files with an embedded license indicating the domain … the browsers don’t have to change anything or even check if that domain in the license is the one it is used for, it’s just a simple act of including the ‘contract’ in case it does get taken up by someone who has not paid for the right to use the font software. But I know this even this non-intrusive security measure will not appease some foundries and type designers.
Abi Huynh: It’s already possible (and very common) to embed license information in the font file – the OpenType name table includes a text field specifically for “License Description; description of how the font may be legally used, or different example scenarios for licensed use”.
— Philip Taylor
@ Jonathan
>> Right. Because, at the end of the day, you draw letters. How much did you *think* people were going to pay for that? It’s not exactly adding value, is it? The foundries fucked themselves before anyone else could get a boot in, by choosing to base their income on idle doodles.
Yes, and I’m sure you’re casting steel beams all day, right ? Jumping out of planes to fight forest fires ?
You got your carpal tunnel syndrome the same way he did.
— Truck Driver