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I am using a font that is licensed under the Open Font License which states:

2) Original or Modified Versions of the Font Software may be bundled, redistributed and/or sold with any software, provided that each copy contains the above copyright notice and this license. 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.

Where can I place this license file in my EPUB where it complies with the license requirements?

Anthon
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Keavon
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3 Answers3

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I don't disagree with the above answer.

I just wanted to say that on the Title/Credits HTML page (which contains copyright, date, etc) I included this line:

The HomemadeApple Font embedded in this ebook is copyrighted 2010 by Font Diner, Inc. under a Apache 2.0 license. (and I linked to the license).

idiotprogrammer
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As the license requirements state "easily viewed by the user" you should include the full license in the EPUB zip files META-INF directory as e.g. open_font_license.txt, in addition to that add a stanza:

 <dc:license>Open Font Software distributed as per open_font_license.txt</dc:license>

to the META-INF/metadata.opf file.

The latter should show up when viewing the metadata info in EPUB readers. If the copyright text is short, you can forego the open_font_license.txt file and directly include everything in the metadata.opf stanza.

Anthon
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  • Does it need to be META-INF/metadata.opf? I am using Sigil to build my ebook and it doesn't have a metadata.opf in META-INF. But there is OEBPS/content.opfwhich contains a <metadata> tag and in it are elements like <dc:language>en</dc:language>. Could I place it there? – Keavon Mar 06 '16 at 19:12
  • @Keavon Probably yes. Make sure to check afterwards in an epub viewer (e.g. the one from Calibre) that the information shows up when you click "Show book metadata") – Anthon Mar 06 '16 at 20:29
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As I had not seen this question, I have asked another one very similar somewhere else.

I have tested the solution proposed by Anthon, but the addition of a <dc:license> element into the content.opf is unfortunaltely pointed as an error when checking the file with Sigil and FlightCrew:

Error XML child not recognized: the <licence> element is not an allowed child of the <metadata> element

Consequently, I opted for an alternate method for embedding such a license file, by creating an ofl.xhtml file using the copyright-page guide element.

This method has also the advantage to grant an easy access to the license text (especially if a specific line is added in the title.xhtml, as pointed by idiotprogrammer)

Community
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P. Mergey
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