Commercial use of fonts

Question

Level 1

4 points

Commercial use of fonts

There seems to be a lot of confusion about the commercial use of fonts when producing commercial material using software as part of the OS or within an app purchased from the App Store. In fact it has been an all day quest to nail down a legitimate ( & I do mean legally binding) answer.

I have trawled the net for the definitive answer but it all seems very elusive; as though no one company (other than a font foundry) wants to truly commit to a definitive, easy to grasp answer. (see below).

My scenario is the use of Affinity Designer (from the App store) to commercially produce material such as logos, letterheads, product information etc for client's for remuneration, using fonts which were supplied by the OS (or subsequent updates). The software is intended as personal and professional use.

One of the fonts in question is Arial.

The font book info on Arial states...

"License - You may use this font to display and print content as permitted by the license terms for the product in which this font is included. You may only ℹ embed this font in content as permitted by the embedding restrictions included in this font; and (ii) temporarily download this font to a printer or other output device to help print content.

Enabled Yes

Duplicate No

Copy protected No"

Firstly, can someone clarify the terms "Enabled" and "Duplicate" & "Copy protected" please? Iv'e been searching for the terms "Embedding restrictions" (Including the "Get Info" option on the font file) and cant pin point it anywhere.

It may be of interest to many, having contacted a well known font foundry with this enquiry, that I was told that I must have have a commercial license for fonts such as Arial for use on any material that is produced, including websites. And that simply because these fonts are packaged with a MAC OS (or even Windows), or their respective word processing/ graphic design software etc does not give the end user any commercial use rights whatsoever.

I therefore suspect that there are probably millions of people publishing illegally if this is the case.

My concern is that advice from a font owning company may not be entirely impartial.

Posted on Dec 6, 2016 9:47 AM

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Answer 1

Kurt Lang

Level 9

69,222 points

Dec 6, 2016 10:04 AM in response to flyamj

The full Sierra user license agreement is here. Within that, here's the section on fonts:

E. 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.

About the only fonts included with OS that were actually created by Apple are the main San Francisco fonts and a few others. All the rest were supplied by various companies such as Linotype, Bitstream, Microsoft and others. That leaves it up to the user to read the embedded rights and usage for each font, which aren't always clear what you can and cannot use them for.

It may be best to contact the company who supplied the font in question and ask them.

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