Licensing Question

marie,

As far as I know, unless the license agreement specifically prohibits it, you
can manipulate the font to your heart's content.

But it would still fall under the original font distribution rules. In other
words, if the original font can only be installed on five computers connected to
same printer, then this manipulated font would be included in that total count.
And it most likely cannot be sold, distributed, or lent etc. to any greater
degree than the original license allows.

Adobe, for example, is specific about the number of machines its fonts can be
distributed on and prohibits even the temporary lending of fonts for output.
(That said, any respectable service bureau or prepress house should have a
license for the Adobe library.)

Please know that I am not an attorney, and you should check your license
agreement as licensing varies from foundry to foundry.

Fwiw - although Adobe's licensing permits this sort of thing, most font licenses
today do not. You definitely need to check the license.

Regards,

ok, so how about this - ad agency owns said font and in accordance to licensing
agreement, manipulates kearning pairs as I originally mentioned. This font is
used for in house production and release to service bureaus.

Client owns same original font with "x" users in it's licensing
agreement to include numerous national affiliates that need to localize campaign
that ad agency created. How do we coordinate the fonts, now that ad agency has
altered their version of the font? Does agency also alter clients version? Or
can we pass along our altered version since the licensing agreement already
exists between client and foundry?

I'd ask the foundry. In the case of Adobe, you should be okay to share the
modified version between the agency and the client, as long as everybody's
appropriately licensed.