In essence, yes. Once the client takes ownership of the artwork, they hold the rights and responsibilities for it. And I make sure to keep an email chain of any communication telling them that they bear responsibility for using copyrighted art.
IANAL, but I don’t think that will relieve you of legal responsibility any more than an email chain of a capo asking you to knock over a liquor store would protect you from robbery charges. Essentially, the email makes it worse, conclusively demonstrating willful copyright violation by both parties and you can both be sued. The best, I think, you can hope for is A) be incorporated so your business is sued instead of you as an individual and only its assets are at risk and B) have an indemnity clause, so that any legal fees, fines and/or settlements have to be paid by your client for their decisions.
You can’t just waive an email chain at a copyright plaintiff and have them go away when you are a party to it.
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I appreciate your thoughts, and I know you’re trying to help, but the legal advice I’ve gotten from copyright lawyers is that my contract and my invoice put all rights and responsibilities in the hands of my client. If they were to be sued and tried to pull me in, any communications I have that show that the client, in writing, waived my advice and accepted responsibility for using illegal artwork puts it entirely in their hands, legally.
I’ve been doing this for 25 years, don’t worry, I’m good.
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What if I said I have Certification from the BoingBoing Store? I hear that makes one an employable expert in just about anything… 
Well, the devil is in the details, so hopefully you have good devils drafting the details 
that’s got to be english only, right?
i don’t quite know how unicode fonts work. im assuming most everything needs custom art?
Voice recognition font, then?
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Mmm - that is more like Ariel Heavy.
Ariel Bold would look more like:
http://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51oO0MGjKaL.jpg
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If you need a pedantic devil just holler.
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Reminds me of the time Gene Roddenberry wrote shitty lyrics to the theme so he could take back money from the composer.
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The designers of the British highway signage were interviewed on the radio a few years ago and they said their commission was to unify the whole country behind one set of signs to replace a motley collection of regional designs some of which went back more than a century. It’s incredible that just two people pretty much created the whole lot and it has survived with very little modification (although they did admit that they would like to have another go at the ‘men working’ road sign because it does rather look like someone having trouble with an umbrella).
My favourite bit was when they were asked why they chose bright blue for motorway signs. Their answer was simple - they liked the colour and it wasn’t being used elsewhere.
Another classic piece of 1960s British design has to be the design language for British Rail which has largely survived the mindless vandalism of privatisation. The font (Transport) is elegant, clear and timeless whilst the two arrow logo still looks modern (and kicked off a wave of copycat designs across Europe). If only modern train companies could employ proper designers and not the people who put a lazy swoosh in eye-aching colours on a few hundred metres of vinyl.
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Are you against copyright in general or for typeface designers in particular?
If the former, none of this is relevant; but if the latter that seems strange: typeface design ticks the relevant boxes for being creative work; but has the advantage(in terms of potential danger to public interests) that there are plenty of drop-in replacements that aren’t under copyright, so copyrighted typefaces don’t imperil your ability to print freely; unless you simply must have the aesthetic of a specific typeface(in which case why doesn’t the creator deserve to be paid for such compelling work?)
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The issue wasn’t copyright- the issue was using the font (that probably came with their computer) in a way that wasn’t allowed by the licence they had. A lot of people get confused by the idea of having access to a font but not having the right to use that font in their ads or other publications. Using Arial without a Helvatica licence doesn’t get you in trouble from the owner of Helvetica, but using Helvetica does, weather you’re in the U.K. or U.S.A.
It’s kind of like buying a book and then being surprised that you can’t sell recording of yourself reading the book.
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You mean typefaces are actually designed by people? I thought Hermann Zapf just found typefaces lying around and copyrighted them just to be a big ol’ meanie!
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Zwölf Boxkämpfer jagen Viktor über den großen Sylter Deich.
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I think it is not entirely unreasonable to expect that if a font comes with your computer you get to use it even to produce commercially-relevant stuff (advertising, flyers, posters, books, …). After all, PCs are sold to companies to be used for company things, and don’t include disclaimers that they’re only meant for private home use.
I have bought a few “professional” fonts from various prominent foundries over the years and while their licenses usually stipulated that they were only supposed to be installed on N computers (where 1 ≤ N ≤ 5 or so) they didn’t try to extract additional fees for “commercial”, as opposed to personal, use. They’re usually quite adamant about your not passing the actual font files to third parties in a way that would enable those third parties to make use of them without a license, but distributing documents using the fonts is generally OK – especially since normally these days the documents contain only those characters from the font that the document actually uses, and these can’t be easily extracted from the document in a form that lends itself to independent use.
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They do … buried somewhere in that eighty-page EULA that you didn’t read.
My computer didn’t come with an eighty-page EULA. Oh, and incidentally its operating system (Debian GNU/Linux) includes a number of pretty good fonts that I can use to print and publish whatever I like.
Ja! … Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
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My computer came with a long EULA that I didn’t read because I didn’t click ‘I Agree’ - I defenestrated it on the very first power-up and put a Debian-derived system on it.
I don’t find Debian’s installed fonts to be quite adequate because I occasionally do some real desktop publishing and need professional-quality ones. I’ve probably paid some hundreds of bucks for fonts over the years, to outfits like Linotype, ITC, Adobe, and Greater Albion Type Founders. The desktop publishing is all pro bono for my wife’s charities because I’ll do for love what I don’t do for money. I get lots of compliments on how the finished product (posters, flyers, playbills, grant reports, …) looks.
As far as sans-serif fonts go, Microsoft’s Arial and Franklin Gothic have the pair kerning all wrong, Adobe’s Helvetica is sort of OK, none of the above look nearly as polished as Linotype Optima (which is actually not a sans-serif or akademik Grotesk, but sort of a serifless Roman font). Optima also comes in the full range of weights (light, regular, demi, bold, black, extra). It’s by Zapf, of course - his attention to detail was superb! It pairs well with Linotype Palatino (Book Antiqua is an inferior copy), because they are proportioned alike, in much the same way that URW Grotesk pairs with Melior (although those are very different modern fonts!)
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