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unknown

We here at MegaCorporation use outside vendors for some of our printed materials. For particular campaigns that last over a period of weeks or months, we create a style sheet that indicates standards of usage for logos, graphics, color palettes, typefaces, etc. Our vendors are able to access the style sheet as well as all graphics through an FTP site. For the typefaces, we use the following language:

To maintain the integrity of the design for the brand/season, only the following approved fonts are to be used. It is the vendor’s legal responsibility to license these fonts.

In the listing of typefaces, we provide the following information:

Available for purchase from www.[foundryname].com

I am now confronting a new issue. We are contemplating altering a font slightly for a future campaign. We plan to get permission to alter the font from the foundry and designer.

What concerns me is the legal responsibilities the corporation has to the original foundry and designer if this new custom font is distributed to vendors. I believe the vendors should be required to purchase a license to the existing font (from which our font is derived) before receiving a copy of our modified font.

As font designers, what would you expect a responsible corporation do in such a circumstance?

• Should we strongly urge our vendors to purchase the license and provide the font to them?

• Should our corporation ask the vendor for physical proof of proper licensing before distributing the custom font?

• Should the corporation contact the foundry to make sure a particular vendor has the proper licensing before distributing the font. (I can just imagine how happy our project coordinators would be to have such a delay built in to the process.)

This presumes that the corporation has gotten permission from the original foundry and/or designer to alter the original font. I will, of course, follow the licensing requirements from the particular foundry we contact on this particular campaign. What I’m asking for is what you would consider “best practice” for a corporation when this issue arises. Trying to be proactive here….

Thanks,

Kristin

unknown

My advice would be to work closely and directly with the font vendor on this process. Obviously just posting the modified fonts to your suppliers prior to them obtaining rights to accept them makes your actions illegal.

I’d contact the font vendor and say that you’re planning to use a modified version of their font X in your templates and that ‘n’ named suppliers need to be invoiced. You might be able to negotiate a discount if ‘n’ is a large enough number.

Then let your suppliers know that you’ve provided their contact details to the font vendor who will invoice them directly and require payment within 30 days.

If the font vendor doesn’t hear from all the suppliers then they’ll know who at the corporation to contact.

Cheers, Si

unknown

If I follow the process correctly, couldn’t you have FoundryX with FontY hold a copy of CorpFontY and license that version? It seems to me that FoundryX might even prefer that if dealing with your Corp.

Interesting …

unknown

Miss Tiffany, that is a wonderful idea. I’ll check into it!

unknown

Kristin (hi!), please do let us know what happens. This is a very useful question and the answer will be equally useful. I think.

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