A big advertising company used one of my fonts for a campaign for one of the world's largest companies (I am not naming names yet). They downloaded the font from dafont and used it. Inside the font zip is a readme file in which it is stated that the font is free for personal use ONLY and that commercial use requires a donation. I wrote this company a mail, because I could not find any information in my Paypal administration that a donation had indeed been made. They admitted (via mail) that they did not pay. I wrote them a second letter telling them to pay up, but to date they have not answered. Any suggestions how to take this further????

MAKE. THEM. PAY.

Write an email with some legal threatening, they should take action rapidely.

Some example and advices :
http://www.artslaw.com.au/info-sheets/info-sheet/copyright-infringement-and-letter-of-demand/
Just google "legal notice copyright infringement" and you'll find more.

;-) thanks Vinz,

Did send them a letter just like that, but they remain quiet. I'll wait another week or so, then write them another letter. If nothing works, I'll contact the big company they made the campaign for. I am sure they don't like bad publicity (given the international status of this company and the fact that everyone in the world knows them).

Also write to the agency's client. Complain about the agency's behavior, explain that $10 is really cheap for commercial use on that scale and ask that they correct the agency.

Skiing top down is always easier than bottom up

You have to keep in mind though that most companies, by lack of a paypal account, can not pay through paypal. They will need your bank account number. Then realize that the transfer of $10 will not bring you much after all commissions deducted.

Edit
Something happened while writing. Did not see the comment on contacting the client when posting.

... and ask for way more than ten bucks. More like 1000.

That would be nice. But ... always a but ... on his site David states $10 for advertising

I personally feel that donationware is a bad commercial licensing option. It works, if the author makes fonts very quickly, and hopes to earn some income from the charity of the commercial use client. It presupposes that the customer will fairly compensate the author.

I'm going to use the example of the Lobster font, by Pablo Impallari. I know Pablo personally, and he's told me that some donations he receives are for $1, and some are for $1,000. Some of the people who contributed $1 could have contributed much more, but they didn't have to.

hanoded, in my opinion, you make too many fonts, and you don't spend enough time on each one. At best, they are 'semi-professional', and not worth paying more than a few dollars to use. You're not going to get anywhere, hiring a lawyer to litigate against someone in another country, in the hope of receiving a $10 settlement.

If you charge a fixed amount, then a customer will have to compare your fonts to other fonts in the same price range.

NEVER think of a Dafont download as being a 'potential sale'. A lot of people just like to collect free fonts. Many people have probably downloaded some of your fonts multiple times, because they couldn't remember if they already had downloaded yours, or not.

Probably 85% of your downloads are from 10% of your submissions. The average number of downloads for each of your fonts is about 62,000. I have eight freeware dingbats with much higher numbers.

You need to stop thinking about churning out a high volume of average to poor designs, with limited character maps. If you have a good design, spend extra time, trying to make it perfect, and worthy of purchase. When you have a bad design, don't even make it at all.

DK Lemon Yellow Sun is popular right now, but there are 1,000 fonts almost exactly the same, and with equally poor rendering. If a lot of people download, it just means they think your font is more valuable than the empty disk space it occupies, and the cost of the bandwidth to acquire it. It would be a good font, if you were twelve years old. You can, and have, made better fonts.

If you were playing Monopoly, what would you rather have?

a) One of each group, so you'd receive a token rent amount, when someone lands on a property you own, or

b) Hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place, and no other properties?

Typography, as a money making enterprise, is exactly like that, but each font is a property. You've got a couple of hundred cheap, undeveloped properties. All of them combined generate less income than you'd get from one player landing on Boardwalk and Park Place.

If you make fewer, but better, fonts, you'll do better than you will by relying on charity donations for work released too quickly.

All this Bob has little to do with what this thread is about. A big agency with multinational as client does not pay the $10.
Whether you or me or whomever judge Davids work as good or bad is irrelevant in this case. They use the font so for them it was more than good enough.

There is no economically viable way to force the agency to pay. The only thing that can be done is damaging the relationship between the agency and the client which is done by muttering at the client's corporate head office.

The agency can easily pay the fee also when that agency does not have a paypal account. Which is probably the case. But a bank transfer - absorbing all fees and commissions - they can do. Or even just put a $10 bill in an envelope and mail it would do the job.

So there is no excuse.

David, als je wilt weten hoe je zoiets aanpakt neem dan even kontakt met me op.

A tweet expressing your disappointment of seeing your font used without permission and being ignored despite your mails might help make them remember their obligation. Make sure that the ad agency and the client hears about this. A visit to their Facebook accounts will also not be bad.

Go for the client. Although this is the fault of the ad agency, the end user will have to answer for this. I am not a lawyer nor do I know how the legal system will look at this but this is the way I see it.

I do not think this is about money anymore. $10 is loose change for big companies and ad agencies.

Good luck.

@ koeiekat and toto@k22: These are excellent points. As long as the information is factual, it is perfectly legal to shame a corporate entity publicly.

You missed one, in which there is a financial upside to the author: If hanoded is certain that his font was used by the company, (and whether or not they paid a licensing fee), hanoded has the right to advertise their use of his font. He could create a text or graphics notice that says "DK XXXXXXX font, as used by X Company, in this campaign". Any font author can do that, with any font they create, that's used by someone else.

A night club DJ in Tel Aviv, Israel, Liam Schachar, uses a glyph from my BeautyMarks font in his official logo:



In this case, the "fee" for commercial use was to provide me with an image of the font in use. He was willing to pay money to me for the use of the glyph, but I told him there was no monetary fee.

I don't need Liam's permission to associate my work with his corporate logo, because, effectively, we are promoting each other, benevolently. He could easily have purchased a commercial use license for a different font, containing a different glyph, but he chose to use a vector contained in a 100% free font. It would have been unethical to have charged Liam to use a free font, just because he had the means to pay. Liam does not, however, have any right to prevent another person from using the same glyph in a different logo, because the intellectual property belongs to me.

In the case of Dieter Steffmann, author of a large catalog of professional quality fonts, it appears to me that the only condition to use his fonts commercially is to ask politely for permission on his home page.

My previous post was very relevant. By making the font donationware, the author gives the user the option of choosing what they want to pay. There's a huge difference between holding an auction, with a reserve bid, and holding an auction without one.

Example: An original oil painting is sold at auction, with a reserve bid of $5,000. In order to potentially purchase the painting, a bidder needs to bid at least $5,001, and the highest bidder purchases the painting at the final bid value. If there were no reserve bid, and someone bid $1, and no one else bid, the painting would be sold for $1.

The buyer has no obligation to offer a fair price. If a kid has a comic book worth $100, and he takes it to a store, and an employee says "I'll give you $15 for it", and the kid agrees, the sale is legal. It's a bad decision by the kid to sell the comic book for less than market value, but the store employee has no obligation to offer market value in an offer to purchase.

My point is that the author creates the terms for commercial use, and donationware is a passive approach. Pablo Impallari made a fair amount of money from commercial licensing of Lobster, but 90% of his income came from ten percent of the purchasers. At least 80% of the purchasers paid $15 USD or less. A small few paid more than $500 USD. No one is going to donate $500 for one of hanoded's fonts, unless the quality improves, and the character maps are extended. If someone makes a font in a few hours, they shouldn't expect to make huge sums of money in licensing fees. People aren't going to pay much, if a similar font, professionally rendered, cost the same amount. If pastrami and bologna cost the same amount, no one would eat bologna.

Nobody should be making amateur and semi professional fonts with the goal of significant monetary gain. There are too many other fonts, with similar flaws. If you spend 500 hours making an excellent font, you're likely to earn significantly more in licensing than if you spent 500 hours making 100 fonts, spending five hours on each one. The one great one will be used commercially, and at a higher fee, more often than the 100 mediocre ones combined.

Donationware is the problem. It allows the user to set their own price, but not be legally bound to offer market value. If a minimum fee is applied, it ceases to be Donationware, it becomes shareware. A font needs to be professionally rendered before anyone is likely to donate anything significantly above the minimum amount requested. If you ask for too much, the purchaser will likely chose a different font, that's free, costs less, or has been more skillfully rendered..

If shaming is it, so be it. They have an obligation to pay the author a measly $10 and they refused and ignored demands to do so. Hanoded tried to deal with this privately and he was ignored. I believe he has all the right to air this publicly. And the best way to do this is through social media. If the company involved is really a big one, then broadcast and printed media might pick it up and bring this further. If this is talked about, Hanoded will profit in this through exposure. However, what you said about the night club DJ is true. The problem is that the agency or the client did not ask permission to do so. If they will say that today, to me, it is acting in bad faith. After all this, I think hanoded can ask for more than $10 as the end user have acted in bad faith. Hanoded should get legal advice about this.

Making money was not my intention when I started making fonts and still is now. If that was my intent I would have released my fonts as commercial fonts. The donations I get ranges from $1 to $50, sometimes a lot more. When someone asks me to use the font, I ask him to make a donation and let that person decide the amount. The largest unsolicited donation I got was $100. There are a few times that I asked for a specific amount, like the one for an ad campaign in several territories. It doesn't really matter to me. As I said, if you want to make money from fonts, go commercial. However, I will not decline whatever loose change comes my way

In the case of Pablo Impallari, his fonts are released through Google fonts. Those are actually commissioned fonts and he was already paid for those fonts. When I last heard from Google fonts, the commission can go as high as US$2,000 per font but it depends on the money the bagman is still holding. He runs on a budget and it is not bottomless. So if Pablo comes out with a 4 weight/style font family, he will at most get $8,000 for the family. Whatever he gets from donations you can consider as bonus. If I were him I will not complain as the number of people donating at Google is much more than those who donate here at Dafont. Of course not all fonts are created equal and there will be some that will get more attention than the others but the donations he gets will easily exceed the amount Google paid him when they commissioned him to do the font. Donation through Fontspace is almost non-existent because it does not show the donate button as prominently as here in Dafont.

Again Bobby, whether you or whomever think that David's fonts are good or not is totally irrelevant. You may want to write a 1200 pages book about it but it stays irrelevant. A font has been used commercially. The author has not been paid for that use. Wrong. Period.

@toto
There is no need to go public on the social media. If you know about agency/client relations, the client, once informed, will tell the agency to pay.

@ toto@k22: re: #14: I totally agree with the shaming through Social Media. I would suggest inserting a video link from YouTube to the song Shame, Shame, Shame, a 1975 R 'n' B/ disco hit by Shirley and Company.

"In the case of Pablo Impallari, his fonts are released through Google fonts. Those are actually commissioned fonts and he was already paid for those fonts."]

I'm a bit confused by the phrasing. You make it sound like Pablo works for Google. It's my understanding that he works for himself, and Google pays him for the privilege of having his work included in the Google fonts catalog. He may receive a fee from Google upon completion of a font, based on his past reputation, (ie: hypothetically, Google agrees, in advance, that they will purchase new fonts made by Pablo), but that's not really a commissioned work. Google is just one of the clients who are generous in their donation amount, or perhaps he had negotiated a reasonable fee from Google?

At the same time, your knowledge of the typography industry far exceeds my own. If you know facts about that arrangement, perhaps you would advise me by private message?

I know dick about Google Fonts, because they aren't interested in dingbats, but Google has deep pockets, so if, at a future date, they wanted to use a font designed by me, I would expect them to compensate me, at a fee level I deem to be acceptable. In certain circumstances, it could be to the font author's advantage, to deny Google's request. People are sick of Lobster, because it is so ubiquitous, (seen everywhere). Certain fonts can generate more income by the fact that they are used commercially as seldom as possible.

In effect, is it the case that an association with Google Fonts can be seen as Google donating, in advance, on behalf of the commercial use clients who obtain the font through Google Fonts? Do Google fonts users need to donate to Pablo, for commercial use, or does the donation made by Google to Pablo effectively make the font free to use, without additional required donation, to anyone who obtains use through Google Fonts, as opposed to from a download on the author's home page, or from a font hosting site, such as DaFont?

If you could tell us what you know about a contract with Google Fonts, I would be personally very interested, and I'd think many of the other readers would be, too. I would think a font author might or might not want to be in partnership with Google. Thanks!

@ koeiekat: My comments about the quality of hanoded's work relates to the fact that obtaining a commercial use fee of any significant amount for the use of his fonts is unlikely. Trying to chase down $10 lost here and there is not effective, in terms of time and effort.

If hanoded likes the idea of the shaming campaign, he should begin here, by posting the name of the company, and an image of the alleged copyright infringement.

To date, however, he has provided no evidence; he hasn't named the font, nor the company allegedly using his font without authorization. I'm all for supporting the possibility of a smear campaign, to obtain a higher than usual commercial fee, based on the disrespect shown to him, but at this point, he should show US some proof of his allegations, otherwise this could just be a self promotion thread. Big companies generally do not risk bad publicity to save $10. Big companies generally do not read the DaFont general discussion forum. Thread starters on DaFont have been known to exaggerate, for a variety of motives. I'm not saying I don't believe hanoded, but I am saying that I need to see physical evidence of his claim, before I'm convinced his allegations are true. He should have done that in the first post, as far as I'm concerned. He should do that now, or I would be inclined to disbelieve the allegation.

Without naming the font, naming the company that used the font without purchasing a license, and without showing visual evidence of the infringement, this thread is potentially an elaborate trolling endevour. We can accept hanoded at his word that a donation was not received, but we can't assume that a crime was committed, just because he says so.

If a guy went into a police station, and said that 'some guy' assaulted him, without providing evidence, the police could not arrest a random individual. hanoded ought to give us specific details, before any additional assistance is offered to him.

Bobby, David carefully and rightfully did not give the names of the agency and client when he asked to how to take a case like this further. David wanted to know how to handle in a case like this that is all. When David follows my suggestion he will have his money in no time.

This is acceptable. You've offered hanoded assistance privately, he's taken your advice, and you are confident that his grievance will be satisfied.

My posts related to public assistance, through this forum, and I stand by my opinions. This sort of inquiry comes up frequently in DaFont forums, including a recent complaint from Des Gomez involving the Cookie Chips font, being used on some T-Shirts sold at Target stores.

Keep in mind that my responses in this thread are not all specifically directed to hanoded. They're also meant to be read by other authors who have fonts hosted by DaFont, or people who might design fonts at a future date.

For any font that isn't 100% free for all use, the terms of commercial use need to be included in the internal copyright and licensing fields, if the author may need the assistance of the legal system. Whether or not that information is displayed when the font is opened in preview is irrelevant.

I'll bet if someone made a formal complaint, through the proper channels, against Microsoft, for neglecting to display the header information, when a font is opened in preview, with an operating system more recent than Windows XP, there would probably be some Windows update that would correct this oversight.

I have no direct knowledge of which Operating Systems do not display the 'header', when a font is opened in preview. I do know that this information is displayed, when Windows XP is used. I do know that this information is not displayed, when Windows 7 is used.

There's a legal term called ignoratia juris non excusat, ("Ignorance of the law is no excuse"). This concept has been in place in all responsible law codes, since the Code of Hammurabi, c. 1754 BCE. It's binding to both parties.

If the font author does not include the commercial use terms within the font file, the law will not reward him for his negligence, even if that information was included in a notation orsupplemental file.

If the terms of commercial use are included in the header and copyright/ licensing fields, it is legally irrelevant whether the commercial user is aware that the information is contained in the file, but not easily displayed.

The law would deal differently between the individual who was aware of the terms of use, but ignored them, and the individual who assumes that there is no fee for commercial use, because they are unaware of such a fee. ("With or without prejudice")

The onus is on the font author to protect his/ her own work. Law is, by nature, necessarily dispassionate. It cannot be sympathetic towards an author who is guilty of having too much faith in the moral integrity of strangers.

@metaphasebrothel You submit a sample of the font, an asking price for the font and a time frame to complete the font. They will ask you to submit 10 designs but when I tested the waters I only gave them one. It is not the font itself but a string like hamburgevons using the design. If accepted, they will pay you when you complete the font. The condition is that the font has at least a complete Latin 1 character set and that it is released under one of those open font licenses.

By submitting his fonts there, does the author work for Google? No, it is purely a business arrangement. The exception is if the author was also hired by Google or volunteered to perform a certain function.

Does Google own the fonts? No, the copyright remains with the author but others can modify the font in accordance with the conditions of the open license.

Does Google get a percentage of the donation? No, in a way. The donation is handled by Google's version of PayPal and, just like PayPal, they deduct a service fee for every transaction.

Is there a need to pay or donate for commercial use or any use of the font for that matter? IMO no. Fonts released under open licenses are almost like public domain fonts. (See SIL Open Font License for details.) Donations are purely voluntary and probably a response to the beg notice posted there by Google.

Is the money paid by Google an advance donation? You can interpret that way but, the way I see it, what Google does is encourage the creation of good fonts under open licenses and the money it pays authors are incentives to do more open licensed fonts.

Thanks, toto@k22. I, personally, never accept advanced payment for any creative project, because I'm not good at meeting someone else' time frame for completion, and I don't want to have to give the money back, if I don't finish the work.

Bobby, it is about time you read - thoroughly - The Berne Convention, which, be it about 90 years late, even the USA has signed.

You may then also think about what you wrote about how you got your software and what sort of version.

Whoa, wow! I poked a stick in an ant-heap!! Ok, I'll tell you guys what's been happening. I sent the advertising company a clear letter (see example given by Vinz - you just adjust it to your needs) telling them that they used my font without paying for it. After all, they did use the demo font (available from dafont), which came with a FAQ file in which I explain that personal use = free, commercial use requires a donation. This donation is not $10, it's up to you. The company told me they were wrong, so I guess the fact they admitted being wrong was something good. I told them which font it was, where they could find the ad (and all the websites it was on). I asked for an X amount of $. They called me and told me they were willing to pay an X amount (less than I wanted), so right now we're negotiating the amount. I told these people that I am not here to rip them off (even when they did use my font illegally), but that I wanted them to right the wrongs. It is impossible to trash or halt the campaign and I realise that (and so did they), so I told them I was merely seeking justice and a compensation for my work.
So in short, this is what I learned:

- if you think your font is being used illegally, then ask the company involved (nicely)
- If they cannot show evidence of having paid, then demand a reasonable sum for your work. If the company is a tiny sweet shop, don't go overboard; if it's a world-wide operating multi-million $ company, ask for more. Just realise that we do not live in the USA and that the amount you ask for is reasonable.
- Write them that letter, tell them where they used the font, point out that they infringed on your rules and ask for a set amount, due in X days.
- Naming and shaming is not done, UNLESS they refuse to pay and play dumb.

And guys, ADD a FAQ file to your downloads. Inside the zip! That way you can always be sure that they received it when they downloaded the font.