That depends on the design of the greeting card, and the exact nature of the licensing agreements.

Tiffany Wardle and the guys from P22 know more about these sorts of licensing questions than anyone I know. Maybe they'll chime in.

Hi Tim,

We do license our fonts specifically for the creation and use with of rubber stamps and die cut alphabet systems (Mostly for Scrapbooking Comanies) and as you are aware this is usually a more significant license due to the reproduction ability of the medium.

Should a customer of yours decide that they want to start a greeting card company using a rubber stamp alphabet, I personally would have no problem with them using the rubber stamps commercially.

Think of it, if they buy the rubber stamps and decide to hunch over an ink pad and jam out a pile of greeting cards, it's no different than if they decided to set the font in Word and print 1,000 of 'em from their ink-jet printer.

As the designer what I'm most interested in protecting is the 'manner of reproduction' not so much the usage thereafter. If due dilligence is taken care with the licensing with the maunfacturer and distributors, then it's essentially a side effect of reselling this type of product.

Stuart :D

Tim,

A silly question, but are the rubber stamps sold or licensed to the end-users? I assume they are sold, with no restrictions on usage. Otherwise you

I'm with Stuart on this one. The rubber stamps are essentially the font in another format. The licensing of the design is appropriate for rubber stamp makers. The end user uses the stamps to spell out words on a commercial product...fine, they are using the tool (the font design) to make something else. If someone bought a die cutting system with a specific font design to then make an alppahbet set of rubber stamps from, then there would be an issue about a derivative commercial product. But "printed goods" should not really be considered derivative products (in most cases).

Thanks everyone!

Your answers were very detailed and helpful!

Tim