Intellectual Property Law

Typekit, Bad Language, and Good Fonts

By Posted by Alan Wexelblat

Last August I wrote about Typekit, which was supposed to help us untangle some of the mess around licensing and use of fonts on the Web. Then a friendly reader pointed me to a story about Typekit on Readable Web.

In the blog entry from March, Richard Fink points out some clear evidence that Typekit either isn't working as designed or is putting up misleading copyright information. Fink uses the word "fraud" but in the comment back and forth with Typekit's Jeffrey Veen, Fink admits that he may be guilty of unnecessary hyperbole. Veen's defense, that he (and Typekit) don't know how to write licenses and so may be guilty of bad wording at worst, may be true but seems like sloppy work. Is there no one at Creative Commons or other organization that could help out here?

One other tech link I saw in Fink's post is worth surfacing here: The League of Moveable Type, an organization dedicated to the production and distribution of free and open fonts for use on the Web and elsewhere.

Full post as published by Copyfight - The Politics of IP on May 27, 2010 (boomark / email).