: Can I use the font "Product Sans" for a commercial poster? I want to make a poster for my middle school yearbook, but I don't know if I can put them up due to font copyright. On befonts.com,

@Cugini998

The right to "commercial use" should be sufficient to grant you rights based on anything you'd like to do with the intellectual property.

But that's only worthwhile information, if you know (with the assurance of a lawyer) that the creator of the font uploaded it to that site. Don't know that? Please keep reading then.

It is good to think of intellectual property ownership as something that runs through a product. The difference between Joe's Sans Sarif and Microsoft Sans Sarif is so small, that Joe's stake in ownership in Joe's Sans Sarif is shadowed by so many other implementations of virtually identical fonts. Joe would be unlikely to push a case for copyright violation of this font, even if "commercial use" was allowed.

However, for fonts that are highly artistic and stylistic, they are completely protectable as though they were copyrightable material. In this case, an owner may very well be able to request that you stop using their product, even if "Commercial Use is allowed."

Many fonts, such as those at dafont.com, are only listed as "Commercial Use"-allowed, because the uploaders weren't certain (I bet the same is true of befonts.com). You don't pay them to be your lawyer, so they're not. By taking into account ownership-stake of fonts, you need not worry about fake or uncredited uploaders.

Source and Recommended Reading: "The Public Domain: How to Find & Use Copyright-Free Writings, Music, Art & More," by Stephen Fishman, 2014.

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@Lengel450

While I am not a lawyer and the legal aspect is more appropriate for law.SE than here, generally at least in the United States, copyright on a font only covers the "computer software" aspect of a font (the representation of the font as instructions/curve data/bitmap data/whatever used to generate the output) and not the typeface itself or documents/designs incorporating the typeface. You need a commercial license when you will be distributing the font file, or a derived/subset font file, such as for web fonts, for including the font file with a piece of software or video game, etc. You do not need it in order to sell a book or a poster containing text using the font.

While I didn't specifically use it in preparing this answer, a source which supports my answer (and which appeared first to me Googling for "copyright and fonts") is: www.lawyers.com/legal-info/intellectual-property/intellectual-property-licensing/company-sues-over-unauthorized-use-of-its-fonts.html

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@Caterina889

Yes.

"Commercial Use" means you are granted a license to use the item in products you sell.

(Note this is based solely upon that one line of text. There does not appear to be any further details on the license specifically. Even downloading and checking the result does not offer any further explanation or statutes to the license.)

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