Font rights Options

[trip13]

Hey, I'm a graphic designer and just helping my sister out (fine artist) by putting together a website/logo and everything for her. She's really wanting to use Chris Hansen's 'Requiem', the font is listed as 'free for personal use', as she is using the brand to earn cash I presume that it is not allowed? I've looked all over for contact info to ask him but everything is out of date and I can't find anything current.

Help? =/

Thanks

[heyo-captain-jac...]

He's only got that copyrighted.

The Congress shall have Power [. . .] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

So copyright holds no legal value over visual arts, but only over inventions, discoveries, documentation, and literature.

But of course, I could be reading that too conservatively. Don't take it as 100% fact.

[brooklyneast05]

copyright absolutely holds legal value over visual arts. the artist is the copyright holder from the second they create the art, and has legal rights to enforce it once registered. fonts are different though and have a lot of little confusing details when it comes to copyright. for instance bitmap fonts are not copyrightable, but scalable fonts are copyrightable. there's a difference between someone who designs a font and puts it on dafont.com and a typeface designer.


fonts used in logo design are under a whole different category than fonts used as they were originally intended to be used. it changes the rules in a lot of cases. although i can't see any "font designer" who submits their stuff to dafont.com being all that serious about their work so i wouldn't worry that much. it's best to just remake it though because they clearly specified it was free for personal use and if it had been free for all use they would have said that instead. using it for branding is probably not what they meant by personal use.