Re: [pygame] Font question

[Brian Fisher <brian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm sure it will depend on the license of the font, so you should look
up the license of the font you want to use.

From what I can tell, the current trend in copyright cases is to
consider fonts a piece of software unto themselves, and with software
your use of the software it is restricted by the license just as much
as the actual copying of it is restricted.

So even though copyright of fonts doesn't actually copyright the look
of individual characters (meaning that it is definitely okay to ship
bitmaps that look like they were printed with the font) the license
may restrict what you can do with things that were derived from that
actual .ttf (meaning it is not automatically okay to ship bitmaps that
were printed with the font, and may even default to being not okay if
the license doesn't permit it)

... If the font license ends up not being clear on this... well it's
also true that what's legal is what you can get away with, in that
what is legal is often determined by court judgements for similar
cases. So in grey areas you'll have to decide if you want to take a
chance on new precedents leaning in your favor. As far as I can tell,
in the absence of a font license that explictly allows or disallows
what you want to do, what you are suggesting would be in a grey area.

---
In order to make a halfhearted attempt at giving independent
confirmation of my claims, here's some random link about font
copyright:
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=UNESCO_Font_Lic


On 2/9/06, Kamilche <klachemin@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> If I modify fonts, add smilies, add dropshadows, colorize it, save it as
> a bitmap, only access the bitmap from within the game, and NOT supply
> the font file with the game, is that legal? Or do I have to have a
> distribution license for that font?
>
> --Kamilche
>