How to check if font is free for commercial use?

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1

Hi there,

I’m building a photography portfolio website for a friend, but the graphic design has been done by someone else. The design uses the ‘Berthold Script Regular’ font (see link)

http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/berthold/script-bq/

My question is whether I can actually use this legally?! The link above is asking $150 for the font, but then other sites make it available for free.

So, I’m presuming that it’s free for home/personal use, or 150 bucks for commercial use i.e. my friends website. Can anyone clarify this?

Thanks for any pointers!

2

Also, and on a related note, I’m using a couple of fonts I know are definitely free to use - is there any convention on crediting this in the code somewhere?

ta!

3

Well if you read the licence details on the link next to each of those fonts you will find that the $150 allows you to use it for personal or internal business use. So the “free” copies are probably breaching the licence. That site is not offering a version that is allowed to be used on the web or distributed outside of your own company.

4

Stephen makes a valid point. Always read the fine print regarding ‘FREE’. Some allow you to use it for personal. Some don’t care at all.

5

Reading the licence, it says that you can use it in electronic documents for NOT LICENCED computers if it is only for viewing or printing. That is in PDFs, or similar, and if you’re going to use it for the web, it should be inside a picture.

6

scampsall, does the design use the font as part of still graphics, or is it a @fontface that people looking at the site are downloading?

Like molona says, if you are using it in an image then you don’t need a license at all.

7

Yes you do - you need a licence to use it on your own computer in order to be able to add it into the image in the first place. You just avoid the need to have a more general licence allowing you to actually distribute the font by placing it in a picture (or a PDF) prior to distributing your text to others.

8

Thanks for clarifying that :slight_smile:

9

Kinda forgot about this message - thought it had been overlooked!

Thanks all for your replies, it has helped. The font is in an embedded image and was supposed to be used in the site but I found a similar free license Script font on fontsquirrel (this site is amazing!) which I’ve used via @font-face so hopefully, I’m all OK.

Thanks again for your tips. Sorry for a slow reply :slight_smile: