Sharing a font with a third-party designer

[Jonlin Creative]

I work with a magazine (as an employee), and we're considering hiring a third-party designer as an independent contractor to assist with some aspects of the layout. We're going to give him a trial run for one issue to see how things go. Unfortunately, he doesn't own the font we use for our headlines, subheads, etc. I'm wondering if there's any problem sharing my copy with him, at least for the trial period. My license agreement allows me to install the font on up to five computers, but I'm not sure if that would extend to an out-of-house, third-party designer (I suspect it doesn't). But I hate to spend $250 for all the different weights of the font if we end up not working with the designer long term.

Any thoughts?

[Jonlin Creative]

The font, by the way, is PMN Caecilia, which I originally purchased from Adobe seven or eight years ago. I believe it's a Linotype font.

[Thomas Phinney · Accepted solution]

Well, you are correct to be cautious, insofar as most licenses, including Adobe's of that time, wouldn't allow this sort of sharing. He'd have to have his own license for the fonts.

As a broader principle, it is dependent entirely on the specific end user license agreement (EULA) in question, and these differ wildly between foundries. But few of them allow that sort of use without separately licensing the additional user.