How to use web-fonts legally? [closed]

Answer 1

All fonts come with a license (of some sort), or a statement specifying the terms of use. This license dictates the terms under which you can use the fonts. To remain legal, just follow the terms of the license. If the license specifies that you have to mention the creator, then you do. If the license specifies that you have to pay for the fonts, then you do.

Answer 2

Buy the font legally with a license that lets you use them in your project.

Answer 3

That depends on how you use the font.

If you specify a font name in CSS, you can specify any font you like:

style="font-family:Some Commercial Font That You Do Not Own, Arial, sans-serif;"

If the visitor owns the font and has it installed, it will be used, otherwise the next fallback font (in this case Arial) will be used instead. As it's the visitor that has to own the font to see it displayed, you don't have to own the font just to put it's name in the code.

If you offer the font as download, naturally you need the permission of the creator unless the font is free distribute. If you embed the font you need to own it, but as it's not a download you don't need special permission to display it.

If you use the font in images that you display on your page, you need to own the font to create the images, but normally the images are then owned by you.

Answer 4

Actually, it is illegal to use fonts like Arial, Times Romans, Georgia as web fonts. You can reference them, but including them as web fonts with @font-face is illegal without a license.

Most fonts with an open source license are legal to use.

IANAL and this is not legal advice.

Answer 5

It is not a commercial/free issue only. You have other things to take in account. Some font licenses allows embedding (in a document, for example) while others don't. AINAL but I think some commercial fonts allowing embedding might prohibit a person holding a document to reuse the distributed font.

Note that most fonts (at least the commercial ones) have license metadata: you can see it with an hex editor, or some appropriate reader. I used to install a Microsoft shell extension adding font information tab(s) to the properties of the file. A useful tool.