[Scribus] font licence

[Tobias Hilbricht]

Am Sonntag, 17. April 2005 22:11 schrieb Andreas Vox:
> With that said, my opinion is that embedded fonts might make a document
> a derivative work.
> If distributed it would have to be GPL'd.

In "Die TeXnische Kom?die" 2/2002 pp 35-46 is an article by the German 
lawyers / advocates Till  Jaeger and Olaf Koglin titled "Der rechtliche 
Schutz von Fonts" dealing with this issue. The summary is:
Fonts can be protected as design (Geschmacksmuster) and, if they are of 
artistic value and originality, by Urheberrecht (copyright). This part is 
free of any software licensing issues. Font files (*.pfb, *.ttf etc.) are 
only protected as software, if the hinting has been done by original creative 
programming. Autohinting and little design changes using programs such as eg 
fontforge is not sufficient to make the resulting font a protectable software 
program. Mere inclusion of fonts either rasterized or in form of vectors 
makes the resulting documents not a program itself, therefore this document 
is free of any software licensing issues if printed or distributed 
electronically.

Yours sincerely

Tobias Hilbricht