The Alphaville Herald

SL Makes Meta Fonts Free For 4 Million+ Residents

by Pixeleen Mistral on 22/03/07 at 3:31 pm

Should be Linden Lab be sharing the love this way?

by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk

Typeface geeks may be pleasantly surprised to find that the Second Life software includes a pair of commercial (not freeware) TrueType fonts which are trivial to extract from the SL software and install into Macintosh or PCs for general use. The two commercially licensed fonts – Erik Spiekermann’s FF Meta Book and FF Meta Bold are included in the Second Life software – which is free for anyone to download – although the FF Meta fonts normally sell for around 50 euros each. The liberation of the Meta fonts was first reported on etribe.de in german, with an english translation on position:absolute. [update: iRoybot Dada's blog broke this story in November - Editrix]

According to iRoybot Dada’s blog mein Second Life, Christian Siebert of fontshop.de says that Linden Lab does not have a license to distribute the FF Meta fonts in this fashion. If this is true, the prospect of negotiating a license for over 4 million theoretical users could be breathtaking. Most metaverse residents will probably not want to look a gift horse font in the mouth – but will the Lab close the barn door? [english translation of the mein Second Life blog at the end of this story]

The Herald contacted iRoybot Dada who he told us, “copyright-holder Christian Siebert found out that LL did not license the font for this purpose. So estimated 4 Million Copies (at least a few hundred-thousand) have found their illegal way to SecondLife-Users Computers”.

We can easily understand how the Lab might want to include a few typefaces – this would allow for a consistent look and avoid problems with missing fonts on metaverse residents’ machines. But – is it really possible that the Lab’s love-machine based development process might not have gotten around to acquiring a license for commercial fonts bundled with the Second Life software?

The Lab has sometimes seemed to play fast and lose with residents’ creations and distribute them within the virtual world without compensation – as Colt Spearmann can explain. But actions that Linden Lab takes inside its own walled garden may not translate well to the meatspace commercial world of real life – where there are other authorities to answer to beyond the game gods.

This also raises some interesting questions for open-source Second Life client developers – who presumably also would want to include fonts with their version of the metaverse software. Let’s hope that multi-machine Meta font licenses are reasonably priced for everyone’s sake.

for the german-challenged, the Herald brought in a top notch expert to provide an english translation of “mein Second Life” – explanations in [brackets] below

http://www.meinsecondlife.de/2007/03/kostenlose-schriften-nach-der-installation/

— Translation -
Free [as in free beer] Fonts after installation

More as a sidenote, since PC-Typefaces will not be of interest for most
Second Lifers. But anyway: They are available and [begin strikethrough]
you don’t check the teeth of a horse that has been given to you as a
present [probably wrong idiom, end strikethrough] constitute a copyright
infringement!

At least “Meta” must not be used! You can find the three fonts in the
/fonts/ subdirectory of your SecondLife directory. The “FF Meta” is a
common and popular corporate-font by Erik Spiekermann in regular and
bold variant. Both as Windows-TrueType.

Also present, a console-font “ProFontWindows”. Meta has been available
in a gift-offer at FontShop. Who did not get it then [begin
strikethrough] will probably be [end strikethrough] due to illegal
actions undertaken by LindenLabs has no reason to be happy about the
small present which can be found on the computer after the installation
of Second Life, especially since it is a quite pricey quality font.

Important Update: Christian Siebert of Fontshop has informed me that the
“horse given as present” is more likely to be a “stolen Horse”! Linden
Labs has not licensed the fonts which should be distributed to some 4
Million computers by now. So: Delete them immediately!

Should there be breaking news to this copyright-case, I will publish
them here.
— End of Translation —-