Question about font distribution rights

[Falstaff]

I am looking to release a game made with GLBasic, and so I'm looking into licensing costs. I am aware of GLB's / Apple's / Google's respective licensing fees, but was wondering about legality of distribution of games using fonts made with the font editor tool that comes with GLB? I was reviewing this on Wikipedia, but thought I would ask here just to be safe:

Are there any legal concerns with using and distributing these fonts in our games?

[MrTAToad]

If the terms request that you email the author, then its always best too - if they say no, then you'll need to find an alternative

I try to use fonts that can be used in commerical applications for free with just a notification to the author.

[Falstaff]

Hm ok so it's different for each font? So I'd have to dig up references to the original creator of the font and how they wanted to license it? For each one in the font editor? I guess I was hoping it'd be simpler then that, but ok.

[erico]

for the last couple years fonts has become a real pain regarding rights.

it seems there is someone running buy-font-rights site(a big one) and they are gathering all fonts there for sales (including their share).
It seems all free for commercial fonts on the internet converged there and thus, no more free fonts.

It´s quite similar to what happened to free 3d models or images or internet space to host a page.

The good part is that the site is ok and prices are extremely resonable, like ~10 dollars for the rights to use a font commercially.
They also have some web programs to detect a font type from an image.

You could also make your own.

But I have some feelings about this kind of convergence, it covers all possible free fonts you could find googling, and makes searching for such a real pain.

I can´t remember the site´s name, but if you google for fonts you will find the first million posts related to this

[Slydog]

Yeah, I've researched this topic too.
I gave up with free fonts, although I did find some that were free for commercial use.

I personally love the font selection at BlamBot:
http://www.blambot.com/

They're not free, but reasonable at $20 to $30, and you can use them in games.
The fonts are used by comic book artists, so generally look great for games.
They also have free fonts, but not for commercial use.

[Edit]
Forgot about Font Squirrel! 
They specialize in only providing free commercial use fonts!
(but read the license agreement just in case!)
http://www.fontsquirrel.com/

[spicypixel]

These are some bitmap fonts that I created which can be used freely. There is a license agreement to thank myself and mention my website , but for GLB users I'll waive this right, but feel free to thank me if you wish They need to be aligned in accordance with the GLB fonts (yellow and blue chequer pattern) however when I have time I'll probably do this and make a new topic here with them. But for now...

http://www.spicypixel.net/2008/01/16/fontpack-royalty-free-bitmap-fonts/

[erico]

One extra thing is that buying rights for a font may sometimes cover only an amount of time, lets say an year.
If you are researching font prices for a game project, you might as well include that job into your art team (have them create it).

What is a very strange thing IMHO is that low res fonts should not fall into this bullshit site right or should they?
I have created a 3x5 pixels fonts back in the amiga days, I sure consider them mine but whoever goes by creating minimalist fonts like that will sure create an exact copy of what I did, so how could that possibly be copyrighted? For one game I did a 3x4 font (the smallest I could manage) and I have already see lots of people who did the same.

Now if the case is about vector fonts them I´m ok with it. Strangely, some of them look the same when rendered at small sizes with no antialiase, specially this kind of old terminal size 3x5, only differences are special chars like ç or ~(of corse you must be working on a 320x240 resolution to bother for such ).

[okee]

What about http://www.1001freefonts.com/
10,000 fonts for $19.99 licensed for commercial use

Only restriction

YOU MAY NOT:

-Modify, adapt, translate, reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or create derivative works based on the font data.

-Sell/distribute this font data AS FONT DATA to a third party under any circumstances.

Seems you could sell your game with the fonts as part of it.
But not sell the fonts as fonts.

[Crivens]

I found http://www.fontspace.com quite good as it will show if it is allowed to be used on commercial games.

Cheers

[Slydog]

Re: http://www.1001freefonts.com/

I noticed on their 'more details' page this feature:
"Licensed for commercial and personal use"

And I noticed in their list a few BlamBot fonts (from the site I mentioned above).
They are the free BlamBot fonts, and in that font's info text file it does say for personal use only.
So buying the $20 package wont give you commercial rights to that font, because it's not their font to sell.

I think the list contains both commercial and personal use fonts, so not all are for commercial use.
That's just my guess.

Ha, the confusion continues . . .

[Ruidesco]

Now I might be stating the obvious, but the Google Web Fonts collection gathers only open source fonts, to be used however you want. Their selection is already quite big and growing.

[erico]

thanks will look into that.

for publicity work people just wanto to buy rights so they are off anytype of threats, even if they buy from crooks or cheaters.

for games I still believe having art team design your own is a better choice.
actually for publicity that is a better way too, but stupid art directors think buying it will gather time...
...strangely it takes an hour to draw a font to the required needs, it takes 1 hour to research font possibilities and an extra 3h to make that font fit the project, and that is a blocked font full of polygon errors, it may take an extra day if the client requests a few changes(as they always do) while if you had it drawed it in the first place as, it would take no time to attend the request, go figure, maybe I just need change work area...

check this:
http://vimeo.com/29217933

back on the low res fonts, what would that look like if rendered 3x5 pixels?

[Ruidesco]

I just remembered something.
One of my online friends is a typeface freak, and if my memory serves me right he explained that typefaces are only subject to copyright for the proper typeface files (ie. scalable vectors) while bitmap rasterizations of typefaces are not.