Typeface serialization legalities

Jules,

Do you have any understanding of the legal issues pertaining to embedding a commercial font using the bits from Typeface::serialize() into an application? We own the fonts, of course, and they would be used only for rendering buttons, menus and status readouts, not for any kind of document creation, or for output to a printer.

I found the following in Linotype’s License Agreement:

[quote]1.5 Embedding of the Font Software into electronic documents or Internet pages is only permitted under the absolute assurance that the recipient cannot use the Font Software to edit or create a new document (read-only). It must be ensured that the Font Software cannot be fully or partially extracted from said documents.

1.6 The licensee may electronically distribute Font Software embedded in a »Personal or Internal Business Use« document only when the Font Software embedded in such document is in a static graphic image (for example, a »gif«) or an embedded electronic document, and is distributed in a secure format that permits only the viewing and printing (and not the editing, altering, enhancing, or modifying) of such static graphic image or embedded document.[/quote]

It seems like including the font in proprietary JUCE format as a binary blob embedded in an executable is a reasonable, but certainly not “absolute”, assurance that the recipient cannot create new content with it. But will that be good enough for the lawyers?

Well it’s fair to say that if you serialise and embed a font in juce, there’s bugger-all chance of anyone bothering to extract it! And even if you did write some cunning tool to do so, it wouldn’t be any use except for embedding in another juce app, so if I was a font designer, I wouldn’t be worried by this.

Don’t take my word for it though, IANAL!