[Lohit-devel-list] Planning to drop Reserved Font Name (RFN) from OFL.txt

Richard Fontana rfontana at redhat.com
Fri Dec 28 07:26:49 UTC 2012


On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 11:30:35AM +0530, Shriramana Sharma wrote:
> As for trademarks vs RFNs, I suppose trademark (as applied to fonts)
> is just a more official legalized version of RFN. Effectively both TMs
> and RFNs say "you can't use this name for anything other than what I'm
> distributing to you unless you have my permission". I suppose the
> Firefox/Iceweasel thing would be a appropriate precedent in this.

There is a subtle difference here. SIL OFL says:

  No Modified Version of the Font Software may use the Reserved Font
  Name(s) unless explicit written permission is granted by the
  corresponding Copyright Holder.

I read this as meaning that if a Modified Version uses the RFN, the
person exercising the copyright permissions granted by the SIL OFL
loses their copyright license.

Whereas without the RFN designation, the font licensor may still have
trademark ownership of the font name, and some modifications might
infringe the trademark. But that's true of software names too. Anyway,
free software licenses do fine without RFN-style clauses (I can only
think of a few, rarely used licenses that have something like them).

> Anyhow, all this is general stuff. As for the Lohit fonts (to which I
> have also contributed my mite in Tamil and Devanagari) I have no
> objections to removing the RFN if the project maintainers and other
> contributors feel like it, but I think that one should not replace the
> RFN with a trademark notice as then the removal of the RFN would be
> meaningless.

As previously noted I do not agree that removal of RFN is made
meaningless merely by inclusion of a trademark notice. 

- RF




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