Commercial Font Usage

I am creating a website similar to wwwDOTmoonpigDOTcom , where we will sell user customizable cards.

Card providers will design the cards and set them up on our website, and we will facilitate the user customizing the cards and then print them and mail them out.

My questions is regarding commercial font usage on the website.

If a card provider (Hallmark as a mainstream example) design a card and wants to allow the user to use a commercial font (such as Arial etc....) to customize the card, I need to know who needs to own the commercial font, the card provider or we the company running the website.

This issue will make a huge difference to the website, as if the website needs to own the fonts then that is a huge additional expense.

The card providers will already own the fonts they want to use, we are just creating a means for them to customize and sell them. But we are using the fonts to create the customized card images, so that's where my uncertainty over commercial usage arises.

Any help or info at all would be greatly appreciated. I'm setting up the font management aspect of the website now, and I'm making the decision between only using free fonts for the cards, or allowing card providers to upload and use their commercial fonts.

Cheers,

Stephen

I googled, and could not come up with a lot on the subject. But I did find enough to make a few assumptions, and confirm what you were thinking...

You are right that you need a commercial license for each of the fonts purchased. If you can find out who made the individual fonts (search the font name on google), you can look on their website and see if you can find a page for commercial licensing.

I am not sure how it works with fonts that come pre-installed on say Windows XP.

I'll see if I can find anything else.

Hi Brokenhope,

Thanks a lot for the response, it was greatly appreciated.

I finally got in touch with a professional font licensing company and they said that I would need an "Application Server License" for every font that I wanted to use on the website. So a regular font license won't be sufficient.

It seems that it would cost quite a lot of money for each commercial font, so I think I'll be sticking with the free font option.

Once again, appreciate the response. I figured I'd post this info here in case anyone else was wondering the same thing as I was.

Cheers,

Stephen