Po.et Use Case Series #4: Font Licensing

Fonts may not be the first item that comes to most people’s minds when they think about licensing and digital content. However, for designers and publishers, font licenses are a hot topic.

Simplifying font licensing, and restoring control over licensing terms to font designers, is one of Po.et’s key use cases. This article explains how Po.et can be used to manage font licenses, and why doing so provides value to digital designers as well as content publishers.

Font Licensing Challenges

Unless you work in design or closely follow conversations about typography, you may take for granted the characters that appear on your computer screen whenever you visit a website or download a file. The design of those characters is not a topic that most people give much thought but for their creators it is important.

The fact remains that designing attractive, readable fonts is time-consuming work that requires a great deal of creative energy. Designers who create fonts deserve to receive credit — and, if applicable, payment — for their work.

In many cases, designers do not receive credit. It’s easy to copy fonts from one computer to another, but it has traditionally been much harder to manage the licenses that govern how fonts are supposed to be copied and shared.

Most operating systems come with a select group of licensed fonts preinstalled, but some websites or software programs require additional fonts in order to work properly. They typically download the additional fonts, sometimes without end-users’ explicit knowledge.

Unauthorized reuse of fonts can get designers into trouble. It can also cost companies a lot of money. For example, Red Hat, which produces a Linux-based operating system, paid half a million dollars in 2004 to settle claims related to misuse of a font owned by another company. More recently, Microsoft has faced similar charges about unauthorized use of fonts in Office. As a Wired Magazine headline stated, “You Wouldn’t Think It, but Typeface Piracy is a Big Problem.”

In short, designers have an important interest in ensuring that the license terms for fonts that they create and reuse are respected. However, tracking and enforcing licensing terms for fonts has traditionally been difficult because there was no automated, secure way for designers to access licensing information and identify violations.

Po.et and Font Licensing

This is a challenge that Po.et’s decentralized, blockchain-based digital licensing platform is well suited to solve.

By recording licensing information on the blockchain, Po.et enables:

• Automated discovery of licensing terms for any font, by anyone. This automates the tedious task of identifying the terms under which a font can be reused and manually searching for the font license.
• Tracking of licensing violations by font creators using the blockchain.
• Custom font licensing. Po.et makes it easy for designers to write special licenses for fonts and enforce the licensing terms using smart contracts rather than having to use pre-existing licenses for purposes of simplicity.

In each of these ways, Po.et resolves the problems that font designers and users have traditionally faced. It ensures font designers get credit for their work, while helping publishers and end-users to avoid liability that could arise from violation of font licensing terms.

Empowering Independent Typographers

The benefits of using Po.et for font management are especially significant for independent font designers.

Today, the licensing and distribution of most fonts is centralized in a handful of major hubs, such as Google Fonts and Adobe Typekit. In order to distribute their work, independent font designers usually have no choice other than to submit their fonts to one of these hubs. That is not ideal for the designers because it means losing control of licensing. They also have little means of running analytics to study how their fonts are used.

With Po.et, font designers have a new, decentralized way of sharing and analyzing their work. They can distribute fonts via the Po.et network without having to cede control over licensing terms or worry about unauthorized reuse. Furthermore, they can use data about usage of their fonts to understand how users respond to their work.

In addition, Po.et offers innovative features for updating fonts. Websites and other platforms that need to download fonts can connect directly to the Po.et network to download the latest version of a font. In this way, Po.et provides a decentralized solution for allowing designers to deliver the most up-to-date version of their fonts to users and track how their fonts are used.

In these ways, Po.et promises to restore power to independent designers. They will be able to receive attribution and revenue for their work without having to sign away much of their control over licensing terms to third parties. By consequence, the best-designed fonts will more easily be able to stand out in a crowded marketplace and reach more users.

Conclusion

In essence, Po.et stands to become a GitHub for typography. It will enable anyone to share fonts in ways that protect attribution and payment terms and eliminate centralized control of the marketplace.

While font distribution and licensing is only one of numerous use cases for Po.et’s digital asset management platform, we believe this is a key niche that is ripe for innovation through the blockchain.

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