united-states licensing open-source-software
Google Fonts Licensing Question
<p>I am embedding Google Fonts into a commercial website that have either the SIL OFL or Apache License v2.0. Do I need to include the license text or link in the metadata/ elsewhere on the site? I am currently embedding in the following way: <code>&lt;link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Anton|Archivo+Black|Patua+One&amp;display=swap" rel="stylesheet"&gt;</code>, and then referencing the fonts in a CSS external style sheet. Thanks! </p>

<p>Google Fonts hosts a number of freely available fonts. All of them are fine for commercial use. Google itself imposes no extra conditions for using their service.</p>

<p>However, the fonts themselves may be subject to a variety of licenses. In general, the open source licenses require that recipients of the font receive copyright and license notices for the font.</p>

<ul>
<li><p>The SIL Open Font License 1.1, emphasis mine:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, <strong>to any person obtaining
  a copy</strong> of the Font Software, to use, study, copy, merge, embed, modify,
  redistribute, and sell modified and unmodified copies of the Font
  Software, subject to the following conditions:</p>
  
  <p>[…] 2) Original or Modified Versions of the Font Software may be bundled,
  <strong>redistributed</strong> and/or sold with any software, <strong>provided that each copy
  contains the above copyright notice and this license</strong>. These can be
  included either as stand-alone text files, human-readable headers or
  in the appropriate machine-readable metadata fields within text or
  binary files as long as those fields can be easily viewed by the user.</p>
</blockquote></li>
<li><p>The Apache 2 license, emphasis mine:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p><strong>You may reproduce and distribute copies</strong> of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium,&nbsp;[…] provided that You meet the following conditions:</p>
  
  <p>1. You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a <strong>copy of this License</strong>,<br>
  […]<br>
  4. If the Work includes a "NOTICE" text file as part of its distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must include a <strong>readable copy of the attribution notices</strong> contained within such NOTICE file&nbsp;[…]</p>
</blockquote></li>
</ul>

<p>However, these conditions in the OFL and Apache 2 license only apply to you when you copy or distribute the fonts. My interpretation: This is not the case for you. You are only linking to the font, and Google is performing the distribution. <strong>You are not party to the license, and therefore have no further obligations.</strong></p>

<p>Due to data protection compliance concerns, I have stopped using Google Fonts and am hosting the fonts on my website. In that case I do have to comply with the licenses myself. I have done this by adding license notices to the CSS that loads the fonts, in a manner that will be obvious to anyone who looks at the source code. The notices mention the license name and basic copyright info and then link to the full license text. Note that the OFL license document may be modified to list <em>reserved font names</em>, so it is not sufficient to link to a generic copy of the OFL.</p>
