The licence terms nobody reads until a letter arrives

A licence is not ownership

When you buy a font or a stock image you are buying permission to use it in particular ways. What those ways are is set out in the licence.

That is why the same font can cost one amount for a document and another for a website, and why the same image costs more for packaging than for a blog post.

Reading the use column once, before buying, avoids nearly every problem in this area.

Reading the use column once, before buying, avoids nearly every problem in this area. It is the step everybody skips because the file downloads either way.

The font trap

Most fonts sold for computers are licensed for creating documents on that computer. Embedding the file in a website so every visitor downloads it is a different use, usually sold separately.

A designer who installed a font to build your brand may have been fully licensed for that, while the website version was never bought.

If you cannot find a web licence for a font on your site, assume you do not have one and check.

A designer can be fully licensed for the work they did and leave you unlicensed for the site, because the two are different products sold separately.

Free font families

Plenty of high quality fonts are released under open licences that allow web use at no charge, which is why they appear on so many sites.

Those licences still have terms, usually about redistribution rather than use, and they are easy to satisfy.

Serving them from your own site rather than from a font service also removes a third party request from every page load.

Stock image licence types

The common distinction is between a licence allowing broad use for a one off fee and one limited by time, print run, territory or medium.

Extras usually cost more. Use in a logo, on merchandise, or in anything suggesting endorsement by a person in the photo.

Most small business website use falls within the ordinary licence. Problems come from the unusual use nobody checked.

Records are the whole defense

Keep a folder with the receipt, the licence terms as they were on the day, and a note of where the asset is used.

Licences change. What protects you is the version you agreed to, and the only evidence of that is the copy you saved.

Do this for fonts, images, icons, illustrations and any template you started from. It is one folder and it takes minutes per purchase.

• The receipt for every purchase
• The licence terms as they read on the day you bought
• The date of purchase
• Where each asset is used on the site
• Who bought it, and in whose name
• A note of anything you replaced, and why

When somebody else built the site

Ask your developer or designer for the licence records at handover, and treat it as part of the delivery rather than an afterthought.

If they licensed assets in their own name, find out whether that covers you. Sometimes it does not, and nobody discovers it until they move on.

The same applies to a template you bought. Its licence covers the template, and the fonts and photos inside it may be separate.

Ask for the records at handover and treat them as part of the delivery, which is the point made in questions to ask a web provider.

Keeping it simple

Fewer assets from fewer sources is easier to keep straight. Two font families and your own photographs is a defensible position with almost no admin.

It also loads faster, which every visitor benefits from.

Every page written by Website Builder Studio passes a check that runs before anything publishes, validated against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards. Nothing here is legal advice.

Two font families and your own photographs is a defensible position with almost no administration, and it loads faster than the alternative.