How it started

Many fonts are freely available at no cost on the internet. There is a common misconception that because they don’t come at a cost, they are not subject to any license terms. Use of fonts without complying with its license conditions can cause a lot of problems such as litigations, injunctions on products, loss of reputation and of huge legal bills. 

We helped one of our clients, a global giant in the social media space to come up with ways to pro-actively navigate the plethora of freely available open source fonts on the internet which they incorporate in their APIs were going to be used by their end users. 

What we did

We started off spending some time on each of the fonts in use. There was around a dozen of fonts we were asked to investigate. So, the first starting point was to identify the company/person, behind the website and the location of the company. We used reliable websites to verify the legitimacy/ownership of the website domain to make sure there was no scam. We also looked for internet reviews for any negative/adverse feedback from recognised platforms and flagged them. We finally reviewed agreements and licences for both uploaders and downloaders of the fonts. We flagged them to the customer and advised them the obvious ones they need to steer away from. 

We added a scoring system to the various factors we identified. 

How it helped our client 

We created a playbook from our research which they can build on based on their risk appetite by adding more factors and attributing different weightage to various criteria. We translated the results in a heat map which the client found helpful with its risk assessment and decision in which fonts to use in their business. 

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