Hi all... I hope you can help.

I'm sure many of you know of sites like 'GraphicRiver' - designers submit templates for logos, magazines, invitations, etc, which can be downloaded and customised by other users. One designer has used one of my fonts in one of their templates and it has been purchased 29 times so far. There is no guarantee that the end user will retain my font, nor that the end user will use the template for commercial purposes.

My question is: should the designer of the template in question pay a licence fee for each download, or just a single fee covering the listing?

Thanks in advance.

Steve

Steve, the main question is Has the designer ALREADY purchased a license from you? If yes, then the terms of use in YOUR license should already spell that out.

My opinion would be that a one-time payment is industry norm, but the license may apply to say, one business and one personal computer only. If a magazine publisher wanted to purchase a font for commercial use by multiple employees, it's fairly standard that more than one license purchase is reasonable to both parties.

My recently completed, (!), and soon to be released new font, (I just need to adjust the 'winding direction' for the True Type and Post Script versions, and make some supplemental files. It's much improved, compared to what you saw in June), will have an interesting, and perhaps unique commercial use license, in which the commercial licensing fee will be negotiated on a 'case by case' version, depending on who wants to use it, and how it's to be used. I'm also predesignating the design for the Public Domain, after twelve full calendar years. When it comes out, you might want to study the information I've added to the header, and the wording of my license, and possibly find some ideas you may want to incorporate in your own work.

I would also suggest that you look at some of the details pages at MyFonts about commercial use licensing fees for various types of use. You'll probably find the information to which I'm referring for one or more of Mark Simonson's fonts, and the same link on other designer's pages would show you their equivalent fee scale. I don't have the link handy, but it wouldn't surprise me if it gets posted by claudeserieux later in this thread. No one hosted on DaFont should expect to receive the sort of fees commanded by something like Le Monde Livre. Look at the ratios between the costs for various commercial usages, rather than the dollar amounts.

Too many amateur designers these days are making fonts with 'dollar signs' in front of their eyes, and equating each DaFont download to a potential license sale. Of the fonts in my collection, (specifically the ones acquired post August, 2007; the earlier ones are well organized), less than 5% have ever been extracted from their archives, and maybe one in five of those has been installed, even briefly. I download a font if I want it more than the empty disk space it would occupy. I have a lot of disk space, and I have a lot of multiple copies of the same font, mainly fonts contained within different collections, or ones I couldn't remember if I already had. That's probably true among the entire group of people who have 20 or fewer correct Font Identifications on the all-time list.

~bobistheowl

Hi Peter,

Really appreciate your thoughts.

The designer has not, to my knowledge, purchased a licence, but I will need to clarify this with them, since they may have done so using an email address that bears no relationship to the username they're using on the site.

I take your point about seeing $ signs. Whilst I would like anyone who uses any of my fonts commercially to recognise that, amateur or not, they take time and effort to create, that's not my main agenda here at all. My gripe is that, in the information section of the template, the designer in question links to the dafont listing of my font, which clearly states a fee is required for commercial use. I'm pretty sure they would be underwhelmed if I were to obtain a free copy of their template and resell it multiple times, so it jars with me they've not extended me the courtesy of paying for another designer's work.

I also take your point about a one-time charge. I think I was allowing my irritation with the designer to cloud my thinking here.

On a separate note, many congrats on completing your font! I have to confess, I'm surprised to read that it's ''much improved'... as far as I could tell, it was pixel perfect when I saw examples!

Anyway, I wish you every success with it. Please do message me when it's released... I certainly would like to take a look at the header info, as you suggest.

All the best,

Steve

Oh, I hope you didn't think I meant you! I meant the people who have Adobe Illustrator and FontCreator, but haven't read the manual for either app. They churn out a steady supply of unremarkable blog fonts, and expect to put themselves through college by working a few afternoons during their teenage years. Their fonts tend to have the sort of technical errors that would never be found in a professional commercial font. Those designers should not look at the commercial use fee schedule of a major designer or foundry, and expect that their own work would command anything remotely similar.

Really sorry for the delay... despite having notifications 'on', I missed this reply!


Not at all... but your comment provided me with a good starting point to expand on my position.

I wrote to the designer shortly after my first post here, but they still haven't replied. I've since noticed they've used my font on more than one template, both of which are for sale on more than one site. Earlier, when talking about multiple sales of a single template, you said that a "one-time payment is the industry norm"; do you think this also applies to multiple sales of multiple templates?

If multiple templates are made by the same designer, and marketed on different sites, I'd consider that to fall under a single license. One does not purchase a font license for a single use, as if it were a condom.