Yeah, even with stock image platforms, having different licenses on every photo becomes a research project if you are working with any great amount of photos. I much prefer it when the websites have a standard license that is applicable to everything on there, because I only have to read it once. Also, if I can't use a resource I paid for in commercial use, it's pretty, but pretty useless.

With stock images there is really only one question, commercial use or editorial use. This distinction is more often about the subject than any decision made by the photographer or platform. Like a photo of any famous person is going to be editorial, unless you get the subject's permission.

The license will be royalty free on even the cheapest microstock services

Webfont pricing is always so weird to me. No one sees a massive spike of traffic on their site and thinks "Oh no! My font license only allows 100K visits a month! Shut it down!".

However, as an art form, typographic design gets the short end of the stick in terms of protection and how people treat their work. There need to be a middle ground right? It's not exactly easy to make a GOOD font, and I'm happy to pay for one if I'm respected in the license.

I like the license Matthew Butterick uses for his fonts. [0] Some things are still a little... odd. (A word file using the font can't be seen by more than 20 people.) But the web font licensing is perfectly fair. (To be used on 3 publicly accessible websites, and embedded using WOFF2 only.)

[0] https://mbtype.com/license/

This is also why so many tech companies invent their own fonts to avoid the whole licensing quagmires.

>It's not actually that hard to make your own font

But it is hard to actually make a good font

No disagreement, but fonts obey the "even bad pizza is good pizza" rule. Low skill floor, high skill ceiling. And when it comes to fonts you want be a little distinct because they're part of your brand small idiosyncrasies can add to the charm. And unlike commercial font makers it's likely you don't have to worry about supporting more than a few languages, and odds are good they share most of their alphabet.

I feel bad for people with the notion that there's no such thing as bad pizza. I've had pizza that the cardboard box it came in would be a) more flavorful, b) less tough, c) more nutritional.

The issue is everyone trying to make as much money as possible. And rightfully, they want to charge Time Magazine more than they do some guy with an ezine with 100 readers.

why though? it doesn't cost the font makers any more expense when Time serves the font.

In the age of digital projection, it doesn't really cost the movie studio any more to distribute their movie to a theater than to a home streamer. Yet I think it's clear why they charge the theater more: one is viewing for themselves and perhaps a handful of friends, the other has the intention of distributing a playback to thousands whom they themselves are making money off of. They aren't charging for the actual cost of distribution, they're charging for the intellectual property and the cost it took to make the product in the first place. If the fonts aren't worth what the creators are charging, then the large companies wouldn't be paying for them.

This analogy doesn't really apply to the situation here, because the difference between a personal and commercial license isn't what's at stake. Comparing watching a movie on your own vs making money off of it in theaters is similar to viewing a licensed font on someone's website for free vs buying a font license to use it in your own projects.

A better analogy would be a studio charging a theater belonging to a large chain vastly more money than a small, independent theater. The cost to provide the physical media, promotional material and IP rights to both of them is the same. So the only consideration in play here is that they can pump more money out of the larger business, so that's what they're going to do.

The analogy is just bad altogether. If a theater doesn't show a movie, then they lose out on however many people with $X for the ticket price plus an additional $Y from concession sales. However, Time is not going to lose readers because they choose a font or not. So, the sheer use of the licensed movie has direct affect on the theater's bottom line, yet Time could choose a different font and have negligible notice on their bottom line.

Font foundries thinking they are entitled to a percentage of the bottom line of a company using their fonts is the top of the list of entitled rent seeking bullshit.

To maximise revenue. If you're a font maker, I suspect most are self-employed, you need money. If your font is being used for Time Magazine it is somewhat fair the fee is higher than a guy using it for an ezine for 100 people. One is a company with lots of money and can afford to pay alot of money and the other can't.

> "You can host the font file on your server (browser must obviously download it) but you cannot actually distribute it - whatever that means, it could be risky with open source apps for example"

I ran into this exact issue as well. I can only imagine that there's some obscure legal nuance to this where if the font is loosely accessible then somehow the enduser gains some sort of rights to it.

In some dialogue with the rights holder, they were perfectly cool with the font being embedded in the .exe itself, which makes the font trivially extractable - as they understood, but were simply insistent that the font not be directly distributed to users as a stand-alone file.

Don't forget "server" licensing, which is by CPU core. And who knows if they mean virtual or physical ones.

Are Google fonts really free?

... yes?