I waded into this territory recently when trying to find a font that I can re-distribute as a system font for a device i'm building. Apparently this is completely restricted and disallowed according to pretty much every commercial license i've read from a long list of font shop sites.
Instead, the intended use as spelled out in their commercial licenses boils down to the font buyer using it only to render graphics for printing or some other artistic use, rather than a "mechanical" use such as mine.
Even after contacting some of them, they're unwilling to budge.
After reading your post, I suspect one issue may be that some (many?) of the fonts sold on these sites are already pirated, and the site wants to protect itself from the only real copyright/legal threat of redistribution of the digital file.
I've also found that many font authors don't even intend their fonts to be used as system/pc fonts. But rather something that can be imported into Adobe Illustrator (or the like) for further design work for print and graphic images - many of the font files themselves typically only contain A-Za-z letters (sometimes only capitals!), sometimes not even numbers, and only a few common punctuation characters.
I waded into this territory recently when trying to find a font that I can re-distribute as a system font for a device i'm building. Apparently this is completely restricted and disallowed according to pretty much every commercial license i've read from a long list of font shop sites.
Instead, the intended use as spelled out in their commercial licenses boils down to the font buyer using it only to render graphics for printing or some other artistic use, rather than a "mechanical" use such as mine.
Even after contacting some of them, they're unwilling to budge.
After reading your post, I suspect one issue may be that some (many?) of the fonts sold on these sites are already pirated, and the site wants to protect itself from the only real copyright/legal threat of redistribution of the digital file.
I've also found that many font authors don't even intend their fonts to be used as system/pc fonts. But rather something that can be imported into Adobe Illustrator (or the like) for further design work for print and graphic images - many of the font files themselves typically only contain A-Za-z letters (sometimes only capitals!), sometimes not even numbers, and only a few common punctuation characters.