Can a font be copyrighted

Answer 1

Fonts are considered intellectual property under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which is intended to protect the rights of original content creators.

US copyright laws have been fuzzy on the issue of copyrighting fonts and, until recently, there had been little direct case law to help decipher the confusion. Historically, fonts were excluded from copyright law; more recently, however, font foundries have succeeded in protecting their products under the DMCA.

Under the DMCA, if you license (allow use under the terms of a contract) your fonts, as opposed to giving them away free, not only is the design is considered copyrighted, but the font as a whole is covered by protection usually reserved for software. Exchanging licensed fonts is considered software piracy, which constitutes a civil tort.

Agfa Monotype and Internation Type Corporation have been particularly aggressive about protecting their rights in court. They won a victory against developers of font manipulation software that allow letter designs to be tweaked; in 2002 Agfa Monotype settled out of court with Red Hat for copyright infringement and violation of the Lanham Act on the grounds of unfair competition because Red Hat was distributing Agfa typefaces, or facsimiles thereof, without a license. Red Hat, which initially argued copyrights and trade marks on fonts were unenforceable or invalid, eventually agreed to pay a $500,000 charge connected with their infringement. Other details of the settlement remain private.

Apple and Microsoft are currently (2009) in talks about font licensing.

Another concern font foundries have raised is against software that allows font embedding, particularly on the internet. Some of the larger foundries are considering embedding code that would restrict web designers ability to use a font on more than one website without paying an additional licensing fee. Needless to say, the idea is not popular with designers.

While fonts can, and should be protected property (this is some people's livelihood, after all), the key to exercising copyright protection rests with the courts, which is expensive. In practice, it's very difficult to protect fonts as intellectual property, especially on a small-scale basis. The larger corporations are doing their best to establish case law that can be applied to the entire industry, however.