How to use fonts without getting into a lawsuit?

Recently, director Ao, the well-known up master, got involved in a lawsuit because he used some fonts from the "Zaozi Workshop" in the video, and was sued for more than 100,000 yuan in compensation. In the font industry, such things are actually not uncommon. From Founder’s case against Procter & Gamble’s “Rejoice” trademark font in 2011, to Zizigongfang’s case against Hunan Satellite TV’s “Singer 3” font infringement case in 2015, the name of the font company seems to be inseparable from the infringement lawsuit. So today we will talk about the development status of the Chinese font industry, and as a user, how to use fonts, so that it is not easy to get involved in lawsuits.

Current status of font industry

Survival in the font industry is quite difficult. At present, there are only a few font companies that are doing well in China. The fonts of simplified characters that everyone is familiar with cannot escape the designs of Peking University Founder, Changzhou Huawen, Taiwan's Weifeng Digital (the former Huakang font), Arphic Font and Mona Font. These brands are almost all important witnesses in the decades of Chinese computer development from scratch. And this time, the character-making workshop, the protagonist, is an old company that has been established for ten years, but compared to these companies, it is still relatively young.

First of all, the process of designing Chinese fonts has to be said to be quite difficult. A complete Western font usually requires Latin letters, Greek letters, Cyrillic letters and common symbols, so there are only a thousand fonts to be designed. There are more Chinese characters, according to the Chinese GB2312-80 National Standard Simplified Chinese Character Set Specification of the People's Republic of China, including 6763 Chinese characters (including 3755 first-level Chinese characters and 3008 second-level Chinese characters). Even so, it can only cover 99.75% of the usage frequency in mainland China.

Once some remote characters are used, we also have GB18030 national standard to cover remote characters, which contains 70,244 Chinese characters. For example, the imitation song and italic script that government documents like to use have the corresponding GB18030 standard implementation to ensure that there will be no shortage of words as much as possible. This is not counting the man-hours required for various hinting, ligature and other detailed adjustments, and even fine-tuning for different rendering methods used by different operating systems.

In this case, after paying a lot of designer costs, what is the profit model of the font company?

We can roughly divide the profit models of common font companies into the following categories:

1. R&D authorization

2. Font customization

3. Font Sales

4. Litigation income

For example, Microsoft Yahei was entrusted by Microsoft to Fangzheng and Mona to design; and the Chinese part of Siyuan Hei, jointly developed by Adobe and Google, was entrusted to Changzhou Huawen to design; The font was designed by Weifeng Digital. This is a great source of profit for font companies. These international major manufacturers have a wide range of evaluation standards for font design, and they belong to the more sensible Party A.

Take Microsoft Yahei as an example. According to rumors, the average price of each Chinese character in Microsoft Yahei is US$100, which means that for a font with 20,000 Chinese characters, Microsoft paid a cooperation price of US$2 million to acquire Microsoft Yahei. Black can be used under the Windows operating system authorization.

In addition to the research and development of the entire font library, another cheaper method is font customization. For example, according to your brand image, it is also a common profit model to customize a logo font so that others can recognize your brand at a glance. For ordinary users, the actual situation of formal font acquisition channels, that is, font sales, is relatively bleak. In the early years, software sales in China were affected by the problem of piracy. Everyone used the fonts I worked so hard to design, but I didn’t receive a penny. It seemed that no one would accept it. So, soon we developed a brand new profit model widely used by major font companies:

Litigation!

To put it simply, the font company will hire a huge legal department to search for companies that illegally use fonts on the Internet every day, and then sue them one by one. When suing a small company, the cost and return usually do not match, so well-known companies or individuals are also selected to start. While it usually doesn't go to court, most issues can be resolved through negotiation and out-of-court settlements.

However, this way of getting on the bus first and paying the ticket later makes people feel very strange on the one hand, and on the other hand makes it difficult for small-print companies that have no money to maintain legal relations to survive. It is not difficult to explain why when it comes to font companies, there are only a few that come to mind.

what is commercial use

One of the controversial points in the case of Director Ao this time is "commercial use", because the character making workshop said that there is no charge for personal non-commercial use. "I make videos personally, so how can it be used commercially?" This is the first thought of many people. Although the specific authorization agreements of different companies are different, such as Founder will be stricter.

But the actual situation is that the boundary of commercial use lies in the licensing agreement designed by the font company itself, and users have no room for bargaining. You can only confirm with the font company whether your use is legal and whether it can be used for free before using it. By the time the other party comes to sue you, this is almost beyond doubt.

Usually the definition of commercial use is based on obtaining economic benefits. Although the videos produced by individuals are free, the platform’s advertising revenue, audience donations, and sponsorships can all be classified as commercial use. So not only traditional uses such as posters and TV shows, but also up masters must be extra careful when using fonts.

How to do it?

Most of the problems in the world can be solved with the four truths of "buy if you like it, share if you don't like it, drink more hot water and try again". And fonts fall into the category of "buy if you like it". If you want to use a font and you have the money, buy it. The annual licensing fee for most fonts for commercial use is only a few thousand yuan. You can’t pay the designer’s salary for a month. Why do you have to save this money? By the way, the licensee who uses the font should is the actual user of the font. For example, if a designer accepts a case, it should be your party A to buy fonts. Buying fonts usually does not solve the problem.

For some new creators who don’t have much income yet and want to avoid potential legal risks, it will be troublesome if they become popular in the future. What is the choice at this time? I will give some recommendations here.

We can roughly divide fonts into several authorization situations: open source agreement, non-commercial authorization, commercial authorization and non-authorization. I will explain these authorization methods according to the usage.

Let's talk about the weirdest situation first: unable to authorize. A typical representative of this category is "Kangxi dictionary style". Since this font is sold out and is no longer offered for sale, please do not use this font. The recommended alternatives are "Magpie Ancient Dictionary Style" (99 yuan for personal commercial use) and "Fangzheng Qing engraved version Yue Song" (2 yuan for personal non-commercial use, 7000 yuan for commercial authorization).

There are two main types of open source protocol fonts, one is the OFL (SIL) protocol, typical representatives are Siyuan HeiTi and Siyuan SongTi. The requirement is that you cannot sell the font itself, but the commercial activities that use it with the font can be sold. This is the most lenient font for commercial use, and it's free. Here I strongly recommend the recently updated Siyuan HeiTi 2.0, which not only has a wide range of fonts, but also supports a large number of uncommon characters, and even supports uncommon characters exceeding GB18030. The different ways of writing are optimized separately.

But not all open source protocols are safe, like the famous Wenquanyi open source fonts that are commonly seen under Linux systems. The authorization of Wenquanyi Weihei is the dual authorization of Apache 2.0 and GPL v3, while Wenquanyi Dot Matrix Arial, Zhenghei and unibit are the single authorization of GPL. Fonts authorized by Apache 2.0 can be freely used for commercial use with the original font agreement, trademark, and patent statement attached, while fonts authorized by GPL can be used commercially, but the products used must also be released as open source according to the GPL agreement, which is very important. Complicated.

The fonts authorized for non-commercial use mainly include the personal fonts of Zizi Workshop and the personal authorization of Founder. The fonts of Zizigongfang are free when you are not for commercial use, and the personal authorization of Founder for 2 yuan is not allowed for commercial use. These two fonts for commercial use need to be purchased separately, which should be paid special attention to.

There are also many options for commercial licensing. One is that for individual users, the fonts of Magpie Maker can be used commercially at a price of 99 yuan. Among the Founder fonts, the four fonts of Founder HeiTi, Founder Book Song (not New Book Song), Founder Fake Song, and Fang Zheng KaiTi are free for use in the "commercial release" method. There is also a very special situation. A netizen once sent an email to Apple to ask whether the fonts that come with the Mac are commercially available, and got an affirmative answer. "Mac's built-in fonts can be directly operated on Apple computers and exported for commercial use. There is no problem."

What about Windows? The answer is, I don't know. Since the authorization of Microsoft and several manufacturers is very complicated, please be sure to ask each manufacturer to get a specific answer before using it.

Summarize

After all, there are still a few questions.

1. Law-abiding

2. Contact the copyright owner if you are confused about the authorization situation

3. If you have the ability, please support genuine fonts

Author: Weibo Programmer Delton

Source: Lu Songsong blog, welcome to share