Monotype Font Licencing Shake-Down

“But before responding, the digital team would do their own investigation into the fonts we use and the licences we own so we could verify everything was in compliance. […] messaged a dozen or so more people from different parts of the business, hoping to hook just one person who would reply to the scary message they were sending.”

Piece of advice for the future: if you receive a message like this, and don’t want the sender to reach out to other people in your organization — acknowledge the message.

It feels like the recipient company did an awful lot of work in response to what was at best a fishing expedition. A serious complaint about licensing that demanded a real response would have been sent by post. It's not clear to me that scattershot LinkedIn messages deserve any response at all. The fact that the initial message lies about trying to contact him another way is another check in the "ignore this completely" column.

The same way that I wouldn't bother to fact-check a spam phone caller, why give any credence to this kind of thing?

Paying for fonts is something I will never understand, I have a perfect vision but I'm nearly blind to fonts it makes nearly no difference to me (except for windings)

I'm not typically sensitive to AI-sounding text but those image captions leave me understanding others' issues with it.

In the United States if someone makes a false statement about you, comminicates that statement to a third party, and that statement can or has caused financial harm, you can reocover damages in court. If there are similar laws in your country. it's probably worth sending a demand letter to cover the time wasted on investigation.

This is like the old IBM shakedown playbook "we have thousands of patents, if we dig enough we'll find one you infringe upon, so better pay for peace of mind". I do assume that like in the case of IBM, some companies do pay...

Do these tactics ever work out for companies in the long term?

Over my 20 years in tech, I've seen a couple cases where someone installed something they shouldn't have and we got threatening emails from the companies who somehow caught wind.

It's always resulted on our side with a total corporate ban on using anything from that company, even things that are otherwise OK / open source.

For instance at a previous company I worked, Oracle came calling for "VirtualBox Tools" trying to charge us some asinine amount because like one user had it installed and they wanted us to pay seats for the entire company. This resulted in a swift and decisive total corporate ban on VirtualBox.

I've seen this at a couple companies and can't imagine we're alone in this. You're trading long-term business for short-term gains.

This reminds me of the Blue Jeans Cable / Monster Cable shakedown nonsense.

https://www.bluejeanscable.com/legal/mcp/index.htm

I wish I could find the original writeup from Blue Jeans, it was frickin' magnificent.

I know how much fun it is to rag on lawyers, but this is pretty much exactly why companies have legal departments.

This should have been referred to the company’s legal department, who could have coordinated the response and/or investigation (if either were warranted), and then decided how to deal with something that sure looks a lot like invoice fraud.

This wasn’t a technical issue or a business issue; as soon as Monotype alleged a license violation, they made it a legal issue, and the lawyers should have been involved from that point on. It makes no sense for some random tech guy to be taking a meeting or handling the response on a licensing dispute.

The author of this post wasted so many people's time on a self indulgent quest to prove an automated linkedin message wrong.

Do these people have no actual work to do? Refer to legal if you really feel compelled, and just move on...

Allegations of copyright infringement where the person making the allegation hasn't done due diligence need to be illegal and subject to civil penalty. The penalties for actual copyright infringement can be so severe that we cannot allow all the copyright wolf-crying that happens.

Why would someone ever respond to unsolicited spam concerning a legal issue from an unverified contact via a third-party social media network.

Even the rather small company I work with would have sent a reminder to everyone to not interact with these messages.

Does sending a personal LinkedIn message to a random employee even count as "contacting the company" in the eyes of the law?

Have to insert my regular rant that while I wholeheartedly support compensating font creators, pay-per-view licensing for fonts is ridiculous and must end. Offer manageable flat fees, more people will license. Continue this license policy and stuff like in this article, even more people will run to open fonts.

Wow. OP is being very generous with their time.

My approach would be along the lines of "you prove to me exactly what font me supposedly used then we'll look into it".

This tactic is not surprising. Monotype has been bought by Palo Alto private equity firm HGGC in 2019. Since then they have been trying to corner the market.

They buy absolutely every independent type design company they can (actually they just buy the IP if possible). They likely own every typeface/foundry you can think of. They own myfonts.com too. Somewhere there is a long term business plan to leverage all that IP in future so i would watch out.

Personally will absolutely not touch anything from Monotype/HGGC. Solutions? Besides the obvious open source SIL licensed typefaces. There are bunch of smaller high quality type companies that stayed independent even though they for sure got offers from HGGC by now. Mostly swiss/european companies likes of Grilli type, Lineto, Dinamo, Klim type, Florian Karsten, Swiss typefaces… companies with often just few employees. I find it better and safer long term when licensing creative work from some real humans and not corporation that uses AI shakedowns to waste everyones time.

I wonder if it’s possible to demand vendors send billing agreements before running an audit like this:

We’re reasonably sure your report is incorrect, and it doesn’t contain compelling evidence to back up its claims.

Our standard auditing fee for requests like this is $10,000, pre-paid to an escrow account and refundable if we find the use of an unlicensed font.

Or something. Not a lawyer.

One can only hope some journalist is reading this and decides to turn it into a news story

Journalistic attention can be very helpful at getting companies to reform bad behaviour (at least temporarily)

In 1999-2000, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) started something similar in my country (Paraguay) trying to fight "piracy", but with real teeth. They had access to judges and the whole law enforcement system. They targeted a company, they sent a polite letter requiring the company to grant them access to the company's full IT systems to "audit" them for piracy. This meant, of course, running some foreign software in company IT, and of course getting access to the whole company data. If you refused, they could get a court injunction in a matter of hours and they would forcefully enter the premises, with police, press, the works. Most companies had to comply. The main player behind this was a certain azure copilot company.

Granted, most companies here at the time had unlicensed software, but this tactic pissed me off so much, that I decided to begin to use Linux and try to use Free Software for all my computing needs. In May 2000 I ordered from the U.S. a boxed set of Red Hat Linux 6.2 Deluxe Edition (at an enormous expense, given currency exchange rates and shipping expenses to Paraguay). When it arrived, I installed it on my PC. The rest is history.

I still have a Windows partition but I just use it to test compatibility with MS Office documents required by my clients, some light gaming, and nothing else.

So I'm now a quarter-century Linux user thanks to these heavy-handed tactics.