Helvetica Neue Light with @ font-face .. legal?

Question

My team and I designed the site using the Helvetica Neue Light font via @ font-face in our stylesheet.

We are interested in knowing if this is legal for us, and who owns this font (if anyone?) Does anyone know how we can find this - Google just shows a lot of sites trying to sell us the font.

I understand this is a system font on most Mac computers, so maybe its license is fairly open?

Answer 1

If you simply reference custom system fonts, then the licensing requirement is on the user.

If you provide a font, then you (or your client) will need to license the font — even if it is a free font, there will probably be some form of license.

@ font-face uses two forms of links: LOCAL , which refers to the font of the user system and URL , which effectively uses a copy of the font that you provide, and it makes little sense to use the @fontface rule, if you are not going to provide the font, then it is almost sure that you will need to actively get a license.

eg:

@font-face { font-family: myHelveticaLight; src: local("Helvetica Neue Light"), local("HelveticaNeue-Light"); } 

Here you refer only to a custom system font and, therefore, are not responsible for obtaining a license.

In the following example, you also provide a backup copy of the font, so you should actively obtain a web license for this font (more precisely, your client or website owner)

 @font-face { font-family: myHelveticaLight; src: local("Helvetica Neue Light"), local("HelveticaNeue-Light"), url(HelveticaNeueLight.ttf); } 

Answer 2

Apple pays for its system fonts, so incorporating a font into Apple's operating systems doesn't tell you much. This particular font is owned by Linotype and is sold profitably. Fast Google tells me fonts.com offers Neue Helvetica Light as a web font, so you can look there.

Answer 3

Just looked, and in fact it is Adobe, to which it belongs, and they sell it for money. So, my best guess is no, you cannot legally use it for free. I have no idea if this is licensed by Adobe. Maybe you can try to find one that is licensed for use on the Internet, and similar to Helvetica?

Answer 4

Enclosing it using the @ font-face font is likely to be illegal (unless the foundry that owns it has expanded its EULA). Helvetica is pretty widespread as it comes with a Mac and Arial (almost identical), standard on a PC. If you are not using any of the more fancy weights that come with Helvetica Neue, I am sure you can just specify Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, and it will work well on most machines.

You can try to find Font Squirrel to replace or use images if the EULA font is limited. TypeKit also offers many classic fonts for web implementation for a fee. Helvetica is not one of them, but you can ask them to add it.

Answer 5

I believe that there is only one official Helvetica Neue and, as Chuck stated, belongs to the linotype. So you should ask them. (The last thing I checked, they do not allow this, but since then I heard that they started to open some of their font licenses for using @ font-face ...)

But, in general, you need to read the individual font license. This is the only way to find out. Even then, licenses can be pretty vague, so you usually want to go back to the foundry and ask them directly.

Answer 6

No.

You can install one copy of the Software on one file server of a computer within your internal network to download and install the Software to an Authorized number of other computers within the same internal network,

This is 5 for this particular license .