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Can anyone out there advise me as to what the legal deal is with using fonts in our skins?
For example, the font Confluence uses is DejaVu, an open source font so no trouble there, but what if I wanted to use Arial or Times New Roman? Would that cause a problem?
I've searched the forums and didn't really find a definitive answer, open source fonts are pretty thin on the ground (although theres some very good ones) but is simply downloading random fonts from DaFont.com a viable option?
Cheers
PS. As a sidenote, I've only tried this on windows at the moment but renaming a .OTF font to .TTF works but a .OTF in fonts.xml does not.
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Jeroen
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2010-08-02, 11:43
(This post was last modified: 2010-08-02, 11:47 by Jeroen.)
When it comes to including skins that use non-open source fonts in the official xbmc-repo it's pretty simple, you can't.
Aside from that, there's no general rule of thumb when it comes to this. Different fonts use different licensing terms, best advice would be to contact the author or lookup the terms on their site.
Arial or Times probably are free for personal use but you can't redistribute them. As is the case with a lot of fonts.
DaFont.com provides licensing information about individual fonts, so check those.
.otf fonts are not supported in xbmc.
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Jeroen
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It's a frustrating issue. Because there's actually quite a lot of fonts that you are allowed to redistribute as long as they are embedded into the software (so that would include skins). In other words the user shouldn't be able to download the font files themselves individually.
So if xbmc would allow the skinner to pack the fonts into an .xbt/.xpr like package, seems to me there would not be a problem. It has been brought up before, but there's no interest in doing this. The motivation is that if someone wanted to, they could probably be extracted anyway when you hack into them. Seems to me, in that case it becomes the responsibility of the user, not the software publisher. And this can probably be said about a lot of applications.
But hey, I'm no lawyer so I can't speak for anyone but myself.
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Do you have an example of a font license where you're allowed to distribute the font with (essentially closed-source) software but aren't allowed to distribute the font file itself? This seems a strange requirement.
I'm happy to refer this to the good folks at the software freedom law center for them to review whether this will apply to XBMC skins or not.
Cheers,
Jonathan
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Jezz_X
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I bet this basically has to do with not allowing people to get a copy and reuse it again (avoiding the purchase fee). Thus why you can distribute it in a way other people can't re-distribute