Licensing issue with Klavika typefaces

Report · Oct 18, 2023

Hi, I got a very unpleasant surprise because of claimed licensing fees for self-hosting the font on the site.

I’ve been paying creative cloud since 2013. Two years ago I designed a simple website for a client who had a limited budget (the site is an old man’s personal non-commercial one-page presentation and is not for sale or profit and there’s hardly any traffic on it). Because of the limited budget, I searched for free fonts and found the Klavika font offered for free on the Free Fonts website https://freefonts.co. I believed them (mistake #1) and I downloaded the fonts and provided them to the coder to use. Everything worked fine for two years.

Last week, the font company that provides Klavika font got in touch, saying that they could not find a license that authorized the site to use it. I wrote to where I got the fonts from and that the supplier (FreeFonts) was claiming them as free fonts. The font company refuted this and wants me to buy the fonts (USD 250 for six typefaces).

In the meantime, I found out that the Klavika font family is offered as part of the Adobe Fonts service and wrote to them that I didn’t need the fonts and that I would turn them on through Adobe Fonts.

They replied that they wanted to pay the designers for the time when the fees were not paid.

I didn’t knowingly do anything wrong, my mistake #1 was being deceived by the FreeFonts website. My mistake #2 was not turning the fonts on through Adobe Fonts, but I didn’t know at the time that the fonts weren’t free, so I didn’t even look elsewhere (Adobe Fonts) to turn them on.

I totally respect the claim of a type designer or type foundry, but paying $250 is too much in my opinion. I’m willing to pay the amount they would get paid over two years (to pay for my unintentional mistake for being decieved), but in no way, in my opinion, is it $250. Can you estimate the value (in US dollars) of paying license fees for 6 typefaces of the Klavika font in two years for a website that has tens, at best hundreds of visits in two years?

Report · Oct 19, 2023

Most "free fonts" web sites are a legal mine field. In many cases commercially sold fonts are uploaded to the sites illegally. That seems to be the case with Klavika and that particular free fonts web site. In other cases the type designer may post the fonts to a site, such as DaFont, and include a written disclaimer the fonts can only be freely used for personal/hobby purposes, not business. The Google Fonts web site and Font Squirrel are the only sites I can think of which offer fonts that are free for commercial use.

I wouldn't necessarily consider a $250 price for six font files to be a rip off. It's pretty common for commercially sold typefaces to cost hundreds of dollars. Some type families cost over $1000. And that's just for "desktop" fonts to use inside computer applications, such as Adobe Illustrator or InDesign. Web fonts are usually an additional charge or separate purchase, and the prices can vary on how many page views a site attracts per year.

It takes a lot of work and skill to create fonts that are good enough to sell commercially. Over the past 20 years the standards bar has raised much higher. It's no longer enough for a new typeface to just cover a basic 256 glyph character set. Extra features are expected. That can mean ligatures, native small capitals, characters with diacritical marks, alternate characters, additional alphabets (Greek, Cyrillic, etc) and number sets with different spacing settings (proportional lining, tabular lining, old stle figures, etc). It's common for modern OpenType fonts to have several hundred glyphs or more. Some of them have thousands of glyphs. Variable Fonts and Color Fonts are raising the standards bar even higher.

Report · Oct 20, 2023

Thanks Bobby, I have no objection to the price for quality fonts (I am a designer myself and I know how much care is necessary to give a quality result). I was comparing the disproportionality of

a) what I would pay myself to use a font as a Creative Cloud subscriber, which I have been since 2013 ($0),

b) what a font designer would get in that case (units, tens of dollars at most?) and

c) what the font owner wants from me (although I understand his request).

I want to compensate the font owner (to pay them even more than Adobe would, to express my appreciation), but I don't want to pay twice. I asked my question to get an estimate of the amount Adobe pays a designer in a similar case (two years of hosting a site with six typefaces with a traffic with tens, maximum hundreds of visits during its existence).

Report · Oct 20, 2023

It looks like they're asking for the full price of what six web fonts of Klavika would cost (at $50 per font file). At the Process Type Foundry's web site the "full" 8 font version of Klavika costs $299 for the desktop fonts. 8 web fonts are a separate $299 charge (200,000 page views).

Report · Oct 19, 2023

Hi @Ivan Berka,

I would like to inform you that the Adobe Fonts web service is limited to serving fonts through the embed code we provide; we do not provide font licenses or font files for self-hosting web fonts.

Regards,

Tarun

Report · Oct 20, 2023

Hi @Tarun Saini,

thanks, I'm aware of the fact. The owner of the fonts rightfully claims the value of license fees that hasn't been paid. They weren't because of the trickery of Free Fonts. Would I have known that Klavika isn't free and that Klavika is offered via Adobe Fonts I would create the code to embed it to the site in no time. And the font owner would get paid from Adobe. But what I believe is that the payment for two years of site having traffic close to zero would not reach 250 dollars. That's why I was asking the crowd for the estimate how much would the fonts owner get from Adobe for two years of using six typefaces of Klavika hosted on site having tens of visits, hardly hundreds. I'm willing to pay them more then they would get from Adobe, but I am not willing to pay more just because I was tricked by Free Fonts. I pay for Creative Cloud since 2013, so why would I pay 250 dollars when the font hosting is covered in subscription. You see, I want to compensate the font owner in full but not beyond the scope of common sense.