I currently have my font stack:
font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;
In all browsers that I test in I see the font displayed in the Courier New font except for my android devices – my nexus and my kindle. And although they have a monospace fallback I would rather have my site displayed the same across these devices.
Do I violate any licenses when I add the font using @font-face? If so, how do I resolve this?
@font-face {
font-family: "Courier New";
src: url(/fonts/cour.ttf) format('truetype');
}
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Legal questions should be answered by a lawyer. The question of licensing, however, can be addressed.
To answer this properly, we need to look at the intellectual property holdings around both fonts – copyright, trademark and possibly design patent. Realize that all of this comes from my layman’s understanding of IP law (that I have delved into some, but I’m still not a lawyer).
As a preface, I’m assuming that curr.ttf is the true type font for Courier and not Courier New (those tend to be named courier new.ttf or something to that effect – it is important for IP that it be named properly (if the IP holders of Courier New started naming their font file Courier instead, things become hazy)).
If, you are willing to accept wikipedia as a source of some legal information – from Courier typeface
Although the design of the original Courier typeface was commissioned by IBM, the company deliberately chose not to secure legal exclusivity to the typeface and it soon became a standard font used throughout the typewriter industry. Since IBM deliberately chose not to seek any copyright, trademark, or design patent protection, the Courier typeface cannot now be trademarked or copyrighted and is completely royalty free.
This information can be found in multiple locations (not just Wikipedia). One can find a more recent release of the Courier typeface at http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/psfonts/courier which includes the IBM/MIT X Consortium Courier Typefont agreement which reads:
You are hereby granted permission under the terms of the IBM/MIT X Consortium
Courier Typefont agreement to execute, reproduce, distribute, display, market,
sell and otherwise transfer copies of the IBM Courier font to third parties.
The legal bit on the ‘Courier’ name is the trademark – not copyright or patent (its the trademark dilution that one would be concerned with). As stated, there is deliberately no trademark protection on the Courier name (which has allowed other companies to use it as the basis for their font names – such as ‘Courier New’. Compare with Helvetica which is a registered trademark of Linotype-Hell, and thus when Macintosh was implementing screen fonts couldn’t use that name as its basis so named the corresponding font Geneva – note the bitmap version of the font was not protected while the name Helvatica was.. and Apple likely had good lawyers for anyt that wanted to discuss that).
(There is much more about this if one wants to delve into the realm of copyright law (and intellectual property) on typefaces – which varies by country. In the US it has been established several times that typefaces are not protected by copyright. The copyright protection declined on Courier mentioned above would have been on the wheel and hammers in the typewriter, this wasn’t sought after. Design patents can also protect fonts (such as the Cocacola font) – this wasn’t done. Furthermore, the name of the font can be protected by trademark – this wasn’t done. Note that all of this pertains to Courier font, not others where there may be trademarks on it. The actual implementation of a font can be protected (the cour.ttf file), but one may be able to reimplement the font from scratch and not infringe upon copyright… though all of this gets murky if one is in the US and the font designer is in the UK (where one can copyright a typeface) – in which case talk to a lawyer again.)
On the other hand… ‘Courier New’ name from Microsoft Typography Courier New – Version 5.10 shows a “Courier New is a trademark of The Monotype Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.”
You would likely be better off defining the Courier font name rather than Courier New. ‘Courier’ won’t raise the ire of IBM, ‘Courier New’ might raise the ire of The Monotype Corporation and given that this is their business, they likely do care. Defining the Courier New font family using the Courier true type font dilutes The Monotype Corporation’s trademark and something that becomes an issue.
If one wants to instead license the font Courier New…
As has been pointed out in comments, following the link on the Microsoft Typography for licensing page takes you to fonts.com web fonts which has (I haven’t delved into it) various licensing for the fonts for defining a font face (the lowest tier has 25k pageviews/30 days for free though you need a badge on the page – the next tier is $10/month and 250k pageviews/30 days with no badge on the page). By properly licensing the fonts, you shouldn’t have any problems at all.
6
No, it is not legal. The font is protected by copyright. And it would be pointless to use a font like Courier New instead of the native monospace font of Android, which is typographically much better.
Technically, using @font-face on a copyright-protected font isn’t illegal as such. It could be used to refer to a font in the user’s system. But distributing the font without permission, or using an illegal distribution, is illegal.
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