rocknbil - 8:34 pm on Sep 12, 2009 (gmt 0)

My experience may reveal some gray areas . . . or cases of me just following company procedures that may or may not have been illegal. The following is my experience with three different companies.

I've worked in both DTP (traditional printing) and the web, and the design provider always "owned" the font faces, but produced work with them that was provided in the form of camera ready layouts or digital prepress files, in which case the font files were provided to the printer. I've never heard of an instance where ownership of the font is an issue for a client.

In digitally delivered files, we would temporarily load the designer's fonts, run the job, archive them to DAT (at that time,) but the font would never go into the company's font archives. That is, we used the designer's font to print the job, but never used it for company operations.

However, a year later the client decides to go with another printer and asks us to pull the archives. They were given them, complete, including the fonts. Which ones were ours? Which ones were the designers? How would you find out, and is it worth manpower to chase it?

Used in a logo puts a different slant on things; they will need to re-use the font for printing it from various applications, and may need it installed on their computer(s) for that purpose.

Many designers (ab?)use this aspect of projects to retain work, claiming ownership of the fonts, so if the client wants them for their own use, they have to buy their own license or pay the designer for them. Which is most likely illegal, but it happens all the time.

This is a very good Q, but without a lawyer's advice I think it would get down to the TOS license agreement when you buy it. A standard operating procedure (note: by observation, not fact) is the designer buys the fonts, produces the work, and that work is replicated as often as required without infringement.

Completely wrong?