Fonts for Commercial Projects Part 99

From the Lion license agreement:

F. Fonts. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, you may use the fonts included with the

Apple Software to display and print content while running the Apple Software; however, you may only

embed fonts in content if that is permitted by the embedding restrictions accompanying the font in

question. These embedding restrictions can be found in the Font Book/Preview/Show Font Info

panel.

It does read somewhat strange. The first part is easy. You can use the fonts however you want for your own use. Embedding is also clear. You need to check the restrictions as shown in Font Book's Info panel. What it doesn't cover is sending the fonts along with a project as is (not embedded). Is that okay? The license doesn't cover that scenario. I think you'd have to go by each font's individual license to be sure.

dasikins wrote:

From what I am understanding, Apple purchased fonts from some foundries. It purchased the rights to install these fonts on their operating system for customers to use them for personal use i.e., like a resume or powerpoint presentation.

However, these fonts can not be used say for a logo, book, publication, web design

I don't see how your understanding can be correct. For many years now, every day countless people have been using the fonts supplied with their OS X to produce every imaginable kind of commercial project, including ebooks sold by Apple through its own stores and commercial websites hosted on Apple's own servers (before they discontinued that service). Normally all fonts supplied by Apple are embeddable, so PDF is never a problem either (although recently a bug has resulted in a couple Chinese fonts being shown as embeddable when they were not).

I've been in these forums 13 years and never once heard of an issue regarding the use of Apple's fonts in the ways you mention.

I would normally presume, however, that actually providing physical font files to people who do not own OS X is not proper.

dasikins wrote:

Tom, did you not see the 3 links I provided above? Googling this question brings about numerous threads asking the same question.

Yes, I have myself contributed to such threads in the past. Perhaps I expressed myself poorly: What I have never seen in 13 years is any example anywhere of someone reporting that they had been told by Apple, a foundary, or a lawyer that they needed to obtain an additional license in order to use the fonts in OS X for their paid-for book, website online store, or any other project. If you have some examples of that, I'd of course like to see them so I don't post errors here.

You are of course right that such usage history does not necessarily guarantee legal correctness. I don't know how that uncertainty can be resolved for those who are concerned by it.

I ended up submitting a question to the legal team at apple too. If I receive a response I will show you.

Son-of-a-gun. I had almost completely forgotten about that post. That makes it easy. 🙂

Does embedding yes indicate it's ok OR does it mean the font file extension is embeddable?

It means the font may be embedded in your documents. It will be able to do so either completely, or as a subset, depending on the font's internal settings. But either way, you can legally use the fonts as long as they are embedded.

dasikins wrote:

Does embedding yes indicate it's ok OR does it mean the font file extension is embeddable? For instance, .dfont maybe is not embeddable (no idea if that is the case just an example.)

Not sure about .dfont, but I know that iBooks Author will only embed .ttf and .otf, and not .ttc, even though all the .ttc fonts are legally embeddable.

Can the fonts be altered? Not for distribution, but say in a logo? The kerning, serifs, etc?

Yes, because that's not a direct modification to the font itself. You're just playing with the way it's laid out in your page layout app. Designers do it all the time. Such as bringing a font into Illustrator and turning the font into vector outlines so they can skew, stretch, warp, or apply other affects to the text that you wouldn't be able to do to live text.

What you wouldn't be able to do is declare your work to be a wholly new font which you can copyright. All you did was modify copyrighted work.

Do you have the original email from the moderators stating all of this is ok?

It wasn't an email, but a question directed to the forum moderators in an area available to users at, or above a certain level. I did a search of my own posts in the Lounge area and sorted by date. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything around the date of March 10, 2006 for that info. Not sure why it appears to be gone.

I did come across this helpful little gem from Kurt though 🙂

Thanks! From a design standpoint, my article is about as exiting to look at as a hole in the ground, but I think it's useful. 😉

dasikins wrote:

Microsoft responded with

"Unfortunately we are not allowed to interpret Microsoft product licenses or provide legal advice, but Windows and Office licenses include a font section which should cover these questions. We place no restrictions on commercial use and the font section in our licenses covers all the fonts supplied with that product.

In case it's of interest, the font section of the MS Office for Mac license reads:

Font Components. While the software is running, you may use its fonts to display and print content. You may only

• embed fonts in content as permitted by the embedding restrictions in the fonts; and

• temporarily download them to a printer or other output device to help print content.

The part of the Adobe statement implying that you cannot rely on the embedding restrictions in their fonts certainly would seem to discourage using them.