End User Licence Agreements are confusing and unfair - have your say on how the new Dalton Maag EULA should look.

Fonts are a valuable asset in the toolbox of every designer and form an integral part of publishing, design and branding. It takes great design skill, experience and technical expertise to design and engineer a font which will perform across different environments. At Dalton Maag we carefully consider every curve, every serif; we consider the positioning of accents and superior numerals. But designing a font is an ongoing process; once a standard character set is published, we begin to plan expansion to other languages, or possibly more styles. We know the same is true for many of our colleagues in the font industry. This effort needs to be financed and protected to avoid unwitting or unscrupulous font piracy. It is why each commercial font has a legal contract, called an End User Licence Agreement (EULA), attached.

In our discussions with font users in the design industry and at corporate level we have found that EULAs are perceived to be obscure, impenetrable and overly restrictive. Furthermore, many EULAs are hopelessly out-of-date with technological advances and user requirements. Dalton Maag’s present EULA is no exception and we would now like to address this issue by inviting you, the user of our products to contribute to a successful and progressive EULA.

We therefore call on you to send us your thoughts on how you would like to be able to use a font, what you would like to be able to do with it. We will compile your comments and needs, balancing them with our need to protect our work to guarantee future development of great font products. The result, hopefully, is a progressive EULA that is easy to understand, is acceptable to the user community and fair to us. In an ideal world we hope that it will serve as a model for other font publishers to follow suit.

Please send your thoughts and comments to info@daltonmaag.com.