Commercial font license [closed]

Question

I'm still confused about commercial font licenses. Do I need to buy a commercial font license for each site I go to to buy fonts or is the license good for all sites and all fonts? Is the license renewable?

Answer 1

Basically, a font is a work of art/piece of programming (depending on your POV) that was created by a particular person. When you purchase a commercial font license, you are basically paying the creator for the right to use their work.

Pretty simple, huh? However, it becomes more complicated by the way the marketplace actually works. And that complication leads to me answering your questions "kinda" "no" and "sometimes".

Most fonts are licensed by Font foundries, who have their own deals with the people that create the fonts. Each font foundry has a different catalog of fonts. It is a lot like book publishing...each publisher has a catalog of books, and there might even be authors that have books with different publishers. But if you pay publisher A for a book you wouldn't expect to get a book from publisher B as well.

Different foundries have different ways for you to pay for their fonts. Some will let you purchase the rights to use one specific font, and others charge you a lump sum, and then give you access to all of the fonts in their catalog. Still others, like Adobe, give you access to all of the fonts in their catalog as part of your subscription to their Creative Cloud. If you stop paying for Creative Cloud, you will no longer have the rights to use those fonts.

So, what you really need to do is to review the licensing information for a particular font, or foundry and see what the specifics are for each one.

Hopefully that clarified the process for you.

Answer 2

The license will generally only be good for the font it has been bought for, depending on the license. I don't know what you mean by renewable, but you will have to buy another license for each site and each font.