Use of Arial Font and Conflict with Monotype

[ryandox21830433]

Hi everyone,

I’m currently an active subscriber to Adobe Creative Cloud and I’ve run into a bit of confusion regarding font licensing—hoping someone here can help clarify.

A while ago, I received an email from Monotype claiming that I had used the Arial font in some creative materials without proper licensing. The thing is, I’ve only been using fonts provided through Adobe Fonts, so I assumed everything I used was properly licensed through my Creative Cloud subscription.

Now I’m wondering:

• Does Adobe Fonts actually include a licensed version of Arial?

• Or is Arial not covered under Adobe Fonts and needs a separate license from Monotype?

• Has anyone else experienced something similar?

Any insight would be really appreciated! Just trying to make sure I’m on the right side of licensing and avoid any further issues.

[Bobby Henderson]

Adobe Fonts does carry 9 fonts from the Arial type family (as well as Arial Rounded and Arial Nova). The styles of Arial appear to be the same styles that are bundled into the Microsoft Windows operating system. Mac OSX and iOS also carry several styles of Arial as system fonts.

Did Polytron's web sites have web font files of Arial uploaded to the site servers? Or are the styles of Arial simply referenced to Adobe Fonts via code? If someone manually uploaded TTF, WOFF or WOFF2 files of Arial to the server without having specific web font licenses for those font files that could be why Monotype wrote the letter.

In one respect I'm not sure why any web fonts of Arial would be needed in the site design. Many web sites merely reference Arial as a fall-back style just in case another style cannot be loaded and rendered on the web page. Just about any Mac or Windows PC will have styles of Arial installed. The same goes for iOS devices. The only exception is Android-based devices.