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frabjous,
Although I think it probably is legally ok to use Southern Software, Inc. fonts in epubs, I really haven't fully thought out the morality of using them but here are a few of my current thoughts:
I'm not sure that morality is violated when a rip-off font is used in a free epub created with no goal of selling it for the following reason: the original font creator company declines to let its font be used as an ebedded epub font so that use of the rip-off does not damage sales of the original font in any way because it can't be used in the epub. Further, if the epub was the ONLY way that someone could obtain the rip-off, then sales of the original font might be damaged because a source of the rip-off appears where none was available before the epub became available online. Then, it would be clearly immoral to use it in an epub, but this is not the situation that prevails because the rip-off is freely available on the internet at many different sites.
I may stop using the Southern Software, Inc. fonts in epubs because the morality is questionable, and if enough MobilRead readers object to my using them.
darkpoet:
Thanks for the info about the Papyrus font. I would agree with you about the analogy of using a rip-off font to using a rip-off e-novel except for the difference in how the copyrights/patents are treated for novels and fonts. Novels are clearly protected, but fonts are not - only in how a look-alike font is created. The courts in the US have concluded that using a computer program to slightly modify the control points of a font is illegal (Adobe vs Southern Software, Inc.), but that printing high-resolution characters of the font, scanning them, and then using the scans to create the font is not illegal. Thus to know about whether a look-alike font is actually an illegal font, one has to know how it was created. There are many look-alike fonts from reputable companies that presumably are legal. If the e-novel analogy were followed, these look-alike fonts all would be illegal and their use immoral except for the original one.
Bob
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