4 ms·

What's the technicality? Typefaces are exempt from copyright protection.

• elcapitan 10y ago
  Technically they are licensed as software, so they are not copyright-free.
• maxaf 10y ago
  As @elcapitan said, licensing is the same as for software. Fonts are intellectual property (IP), just like most other intangible products of R&D. It is too bad, of course, and my usual opinion about IP applies. However, we don't live in an ideal world, and many of us are stuck following rules we don't agree with. What I'd personally find more interesting is a first-principles research effort to find out what makes some fonts so much better than others. My gut tells me that such an effort might yield, as a side effect, a formal method for creating such fonts that are especially well suited for a specific purpose.
• JonathonW 10y ago
  Typeface designs are not copyrightable-- there's nothing stopping me from looking at (for example) Futura, redrawing it, and selling the redrawn version myself. (Coincidentally, Futura itself, as a popular pre-digital era typeface, has been independently digitized several times by different companies.) Font files, meaning the specific binary files implementing a typeface on your computer, most certainly are copyrightable and licensable. If I were to purchase Myriad from Adobe, I couldn't just hand that font over to you-- that would be against the license agreement and would qualify as software piracy. (This is all based on US copyright; YMMV if you're elsewhere.)