Am Sonntag, 17. April 2005 22:11 schrieb Andreas Vox: > With that said, my opinion is that embedded fonts might make a document > a derivative work. > If distributed it would have to be GPL'd.
In "Die TeXnische Kom?die" 2/2002 pp 35-46 is an article by the German lawyers / advocates Till Jaeger and Olaf Koglin titled "Der rechtliche Schutz von Fonts" dealing with this issue. The summary is: Fonts can be protected as design (Geschmacksmuster) and, if they are of artistic value and originality, by Urheberrecht (copyright). This part is free of any software licensing issues. Font files (*.pfb, *.ttf etc.) are only protected as software, if the hinting has been done by original creative programming. Autohinting and little design changes using programs such as eg fontforge is not sufficient to make the resulting font a protectable software program. Mere inclusion of fonts either rasterized or in form of vectors makes the resulting documents not a program itself, therefore this document is free of any software licensing issues if printed or distributed electronically. Yours sincerely Tobias Hilbricht
