URW-Garamond's license and PDF documents embedding it
I am a lawyer. But I am not a copyright lawyer, and I am not a Californian lawyer (Californian law purports to cover the AFPL: whether it does or not might be a difficult question, and would depend on where you are). So this is not legal advice! If you want reliable legal advice, you should get it from a lawyer who you give all the details to. It's also a real minefield, because exactly what is copyrightable in a font varies from place to place.
I think we can speak to the intent here, though. The writer of the AFPL assumed US law, in which font data is copyrightable, but the actual graphic design of the font is not. They specified that you can freely distribute but cannot sell distributed works, but also included this line (emphasis added)
Functional use (running) of the Program is not restricted, and any output produced through the use of the Program is subject to this license only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program).
I'd be pretty confident that this means that if you used the outlines to produce a printed book, that would not be restricted, because it would only be a work "based on the Program" (if at all) because the Program had been run.
What about embedding in a PDF? Well, at that point there's room for argument. It's not dealt with expressly, probably because of the age of the licence. It all depends on whether, when a "program" consists of font outlines, you think that embedding those outlines in a PDF is a way of "running" the program. To me, it's not clear what it means to "run" font outlines. But I must say that I think the commonsense view would probably be that embedding in a PDF is a way of "running" the program, and therefore OK, because the PDF is not a derivative work independently of running the program. If that's so, then it's equally OK to sell a PDF. However, I know counter-arguments could be made.
Suppose I'm wrong. What's the worst that could happen? Two things, in the vanishingly unlikely case that anyone wanted to challenge you:
You might be ordered to stop distributing the PDF in that form, in which case you would need to re-typeset using another font.
You might be ordered to pay a royalty for the use of the font for commercial purposes. URW's most likely applicable license (its e-book license) seems to run at about €60 per font/weight, so if you used (say) regular, smallcaps, italics, bold, and bold italic the maximum liability would be in the region of €300.
In the real world, those are pretty low risks even if you were challenged, which is incredibly unlikely. To me the real question here is ethical. If you are not selling the work commercially, I think you are good, in terms of the letter and spirit of the license. If you are selling it, then you might decide it's more consistent with the spirit in which Garamond 8 was released to use a different font -- one which either has a very clear "free as a bird" license, or one you pay for. I would.
I am not a lawyer, so if you want to get reliable information on this, ask a copyright lawyer in your jurisdiction.
In general, you might have seen that garamondx can be installed using getnonfreefonts in TeXLive. To quote some of their policies:
The minimum requirements are:
- The font license must allow to use the font without any restriction, even in commercial environments.
- Distribution of generated files (PDF,PS, ...), containing subsets of the fonts, must be allowed without any restriction. Notes:
So this indicates that the team responsible for getnonfreefonts assumes that embedding subsets of the fonts in your document is most likely allowed.
Of course, you should also remember their note:
Notes
- Most font vendors don't allow to distribute documents containing their fonts completely. TeX Live is configured by default to insert only subsets of fonts into generated files. Therefore getnonfreefonts accepts fonts with this restriction.
While I am not a lawyer, the license says, “Distribution of the Program or any work based on the Program by a commercial organization to any third party is prohibited if any payment is made in connection with such distribution” (emphasis added). It then lists a few exceptions, mostly relating to distributing ghostscript on physical media.
If these terms mean what they look like, and hold up, a book that used the free version of URW Garamond—or any subset or modification of it—could not be sold commercially. You could use another version of Garamond that does not have this restriction, such as Adobe Garamond Pro (on which URW Garamond is based) or EB Garamond (which is free to use however you like).
In the comments, it was pointed out that the meaning of “commercial organization” is ambiguous as well.