This, Leonard, is thin ice.
Let me explain, if you designed the letter shape yourself
not using a part, however small, of an already existing typeface, then you automatically own the copyright on your newly designed typeface. You do not need to register anything to obtain the copyright. It is wise though that you keep a paper trail proofing that you were the first one to publish the typeface. So keep all your sketches, publish a pdf with an explanation about the creation of the typeface, include those sketches and
images of mediocre quality of the character set. I suggest jpg format with a hefty compression. Do not embed the typeface in the pdf.
Having done so you have secured that you can claim the copyright.
That was the good news. Now comes the bad.
Enforcing copyright is a long and costly legal procedure and for a private person hardly - if not not at all - doable. The Walt Disney company is big and powerful enough to enforce the copyright on their cartoon characters and so is the Escher Foundation on Escher's drawings to name two to give you an impression. They know how to, employ their own specialized lawyers so they can act swift and with force. A private person, alas, can not.
More bad news.
As soon as you publish a typeface as a downloadable font-file it will be stolen and redistributed instantly. Spiders are crawling the web 24/7 to find new font-files. Adding a license agreement with your font-file will not help you. That text-file will be stripped immediately. So you should put the license agreement, prohibiting redistribution in the header of your font-file. Not that that will help you either. It will still be redistributed.
Your possible but not guaranteed way out.
Do not publish the font-file. Publish that pdf. On Behance or wherever you like. Make that pdf very easy to find through social media. If people then want that font-file they will have to do whatever you ask them to do and after that you send them the font-file and the license agreement for the use of the font-file, prohibiting redistribution. This will still not prevent redistribution but at least you have minimized the chance.
If you were thinking of publishing on Dafont make sure you publish an incomplete beta version with some serious errors like intersecting contours and/or contours in the wrong direction in the font-file. And/or for example, put an a, e, A and E in that do not match the typeface design. Then that crippled and almost useless thing will be available on many, many crappy font sites in no time. Show the real a, e, A and E in an image, but not so big that it can be traced. Also in that demo do not include any accented letters. Not even for your own language. Contact the admin of dafont.com on why you submit a crippled beta and how people can obtain the real thing.
Having done all that create an email account that will last as long as you live. So not an email account with your Internet service provider. There is no guarantee that that one can always be reached. On the contrary, there is a guarantee that sooner or later your service provider will be bought or goes bankrupt and ... adiós email address.
Gmail seems to be a saver bet, but still you don't know. Best is to create and keep alive your own domain. As long as you keep that up your email on that domain will work.
Have fun ...
Added kk:
On the subject of registering the name of the typeface, that is to protect the name so that no-one else can publish another typeface with the same name, go to your national trademark registration office and have it registered as a trademark. Be aware that you will have to do this for each and every country where you want to protect that name. Your national trademark registration office can help you with this. A costly affair even when it is only for the protection of a typeface name.
Edited on Oct 27, 2013 at 16:03 by koeiekat
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