Font Copyright

[JSwoff]

I had a bit of a legal question for the group. I get a lot of customers that ask for a specific font in their designs and I'm unsure if I can even legally use them. Most fonts included in windows seem to have licensing and copyrights against them. Is it even something I should be worried about or do I need to find public domain fonts or free for commercial use fonts?

[Catspit Productions]

No, don’t worry about it. The fonts installed on a computer are there for your usage. You may use them in images for reproduction at your level. Doing local print jobs with the fonts installed on your computer is legitimate. For standard commercial print jobs where you create the artwork and retain the copyrights you may use any font on the computer.

If you are generating a unique design and selling the copyrights to the customer as an image they may copyright then you may want to use an Open Source font for simplicity.

I’ll put it to you this way. You can submit images with text for copyright to the Library of Congress using say Arial as a “text placeholder” meaning the words are part of the copyrighted image but the font is not.

You may not copyright an image with fonts that have a copyright and own the fonts in that design. The only way you can own a copyrighted font is if you created it and hold the copyright.

So no one will hunt you down for using computer installed fonts for screen printing work on a smaller commercial level. Now if you somehow started a giant brand that was printing hundreds of thousands of garments with a copyrighted font then in that case you would want spend the money to create your own fonts and own the design entirely.

Does that make any sense?

[JSwoff]

Makes perfect sense. I just wanted to be certain before I got myself into trouble.