ad agency, font licensing EULA and/or indemnification form

[jjdewtt]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

I am employed at an advertising agency and we are auditing our font library to ensure that we are legal with licensing, etc.

Part of this initiative involves creating some kind of font usage licensing agreement and/or indemnification form to release with the final digital files that we send to the client and/or commercial printers, etc. We are looking for something that protects our company from liability for external usage of the fonts that we release.

Can anyone here provide any recommendations for what approach to take with this? Looking for standard legal documentation to customize for our company for this purpose. I see the standard EULA's for each type foundry and am still researching other options.

Any assistance with this would be greatly appreciated. I'm not sure yet if having our lawyer create this kind of documentation is needed or not.

Thanks.

Josh

[oldnick]

If you adhere to the conditions set forth in each foundry's EULA, you won't need to be indemnified: it's as simple as that. Beyond that, separating EULAs into those which allow modification for internal usage (which is to say, not for resale as a font) and those which do not is as far as you probably need to winnow.

[aluminum]

Typically, EULAs don't allow you to give copies of the font to the client. You could transfer the license to them, but then your agency would give up said license in the transaction.

As oldnick says, this is an issue between your company and the type foundry and the EULA agreed to at the time of purchase.

[jjdewtt]

Thanks so much for your information!

[Dunwich Type]

You could transfer the license to them, but then your agency would give up said license in the transaction.

It is worth noting that some EULAs are explicitly non-transferable and designers often cannot transfer licenses to a client.

[karasu]

Furthermore it's worth noting that in the EU software licenses are transferable (even if the EULA says otherwise) in case the license is intended for non-timebound use. (The legal argument is that the value has

See: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-07-03/oracle-can-t-stop-software-l...
and the case in the EU database:
http://curia.europa.eu/juris/liste.jsf?language=en&num=C-128/11

Also, regarding the editing of font files: fair use allows the reverse engineering of font files for compatibility reasons. I'm unsure whether this would also apply to adding glyphs to font files to make the font compatible with the unicode ranges of other programmes.

Cheers,
K