On Mon, Feb 07, 2000 at 08:54:29PM +0200, Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho wrote: > AFAIK, US fair use includes such things as scientific or journalistic > citation or commentary, and making copies for one's education. > For example, republishing a book is not fair use, and use of fonts often > is republication.
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html (the section of U.S. Copyright law which defines the term fair use) says that when determining fair use the nature of the copyrighted work should be considered. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/117.html (the section of U.S. Copyright law which talks about computer programs) makes it clear that copying a program to run it is legal. [This doesn't give you permission to distribute that copy, but who cares?] However, http://www.faqs.org/faqs/fonts-faq/part2, seems to indicate that bitmapped fonts aren't even considered computer programs -- scalable fonts are considered computer programs, but their representation on the screen is considered output from that program, not the program itself. Anyways, I don't see anything that says that a person who owns a legal copy of a font would not be allowed to prepare text which displays that font. -- Raul
