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Is there a way to bequeath your ownership of a collection of digital stuff? I’m defintely not talking about stupid shit like NFTs. I mean useful digital things like fonts and assets that you paid for. I started to look around and the short answer is...no.

Every font user must be covered by a license. Each license is valid for one legal entity only. Separate entities must purchase separate licenses.

It’s a pretty standard of an end user license agreement (EULA) to only allow the person who bought the fonts—the license holder—to use them. That’s it. If that’s you, when you’re gone, so are those fonts. Unusable.

Only you can use the fonts.

$100–500 for a well-designed and well-built font from an independent foundry is honestly a very reasonable price at the time of this writing. Fonts are something I value and prioritize spending money on, but most non-designer people could never understand paying the equivalent of a car payment for a folder of files you install on your computer. My kid lost their mind when I told them I paid $400 for a font the other day.

It is conceivably very easy to spend thousands of dollars on fonts as a professional designer. Imagine being some sort of craftsman (say, a baker, or carpenter) and spending $10K on various specialized and durable tools over the course of your career. If it was me, I would very much want to pass those tools on to someone that might make good use of them.

There are a few digital-only products I’m thinking of here. These are all things you buy on the internet as a professional desinger.

• Fonts (.woff, woff2, .otf, .ttf files...)
• Brushes and textures (Procreate, Illustrator, etc.)
• Textures (image files)
• eBooks
• PDFs

Could we give our licenses and ownership of digital stuff back to some entity/organization that could repurpose them? There are so many designers that deserve to work with these tools. I want to give my fonts to some one!