On 9/27/05, Lynne Anne Rhodes <oxbow@spiritbase.net> wrote:
As I understand it this remains the case. Adobe have tried to suggest some fonts are in fact computer programs but this still does not protect the glyphs or documents containing them.
I do not think there is any law anywhere in the world that restricts the unlimited distribution of pdf files containing any font that the generating program inserted.
Fonts are computer programs, and have been protected as such in courts of law. If you embed these fonts in a PDF, they are still copyrighted and are legal to copy only if the copyright holder gave rights to copy. There is no blanket right to embed fonts in PDF files and distribute them. Marcello, however, is at least partially wrong; licenses of these fonts come with Windows, so there's no need to buy a license, and I suspect that they are embeddable; Microsoft paid a lot for their users to make wide use of these fonts, and went so far as to offer them to non-Windows users at one point. As much to the point, typefaces, not just font files but typefaces, are protected in much of the world. Your broad assumption that there is "no law anywhere in the world" is wrong. "even in the United States fonts per se fonts are not copyright viz:" is completely wrong; it is the US that is the exception at not covering them with copyright.