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designworks
03-18-2007, 06:31 PM
Hi,
The newbie to graphic design here again, with a question on font copyrights now. I downloaded a bunch of fonts I bought on ebay called "The Font Thing," for $1.99. The person selling it claims the fonts are royalty free. But when I finally managed to download them to my computer, and copied one into Illustrator, I got an error message that stated, "font is copyrighted, and cannot be read in PDF." I questioned the seller on what that means, because she states they are "royalty free," and she just replied, "Yes, they are royalty free." So can I use them without paying a fee, or am I going to have to pay for a license to use them? I don't want to waste my time using them if I have to pay for them.

The seller also has a website, called www.ozemail.com.au/~scef/tft.html, if you want to look it up.

Also, anyone know the copyright rules on using all the Dover clip art that is out there? They claim to be royalty free too, but inside their books they say you can only use up to 12 designs in one publication. This is very confusing to me. Does anyone have a good resourse for royalty & copyright free graphics otherwise?

Scott Weichert
03-18-2007, 06:53 PM
Royalty-free does not mean free.

http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Royalty-free

Some font licenses, even though they may have a royalty-free license, will not allow embedding into PDF documents.

designworks
03-18-2007, 08:32 PM
Thanks for the good reference on explaining the "royalty-free" terms. This has been very confusing to me.

I Know nothing is usually ever free, but does anyone know of a website that offers font usage for free, other than the act of publisizing their resource upon publication?

phenn
03-20-2007, 02:11 PM
Check out
www.urbanfonts.com
www.dafont.com

Hope these help!

MichaelSchade
03-22-2007, 12:43 AM
Ah phenn, you beat me to it!