Dealer Login
To Our Valued Customers:
Tatex has built its reputation on providing excellent products and services – but maybe more importantly, in being an ethical business partner to its many customers and vendors. Maintaining our customer's and vendor's confidential information and intellectual property has always been a top priority for Tatex. We know this is a critical issue in many of our business relationships.
For the past several months, Tatex has undertaken a stringent review of our use of fonts in connection with work for our customers. With the proliferation of electronic publishing, it has become easier than ever for designers to create text and graphic files and transmit work to printers for production. However, this has also raised issues regarding compliance with copyright and licensing requirements related to reproduction of fonts. In fact, most font licenses include provisions prohibiting printers from reproducing editable copies of fonts owned by that font company for which that printer does not have licenses.
We realize that most of our customers are totally unaware of this issue. We are also aware that not all printers fully understand this issue and sometimes even provide inaccurate information. However, fonts are subject to copyright and license protection in substantially the same way that software is subject to such restrictions. Most companies have established software auditing programs to assure compliance with the applicable requirements, yet few printers have realized that reproducing fonts without appropriate licenses is both illegal and unethical. Failing to take appropriate action could expose both our customers and our company to substantial liability.
Without belaboring the legal analysis, we have found two legal and ethical ways to approach this situation: (1) have files transmitted in non-editable formats (e. g. PDF); or (2) obtain licenses from the font owners for the fonts used by our customers.
While we have over the years established a large font library with all the appropriate licenses, we do find from time to time that certain fonts used by our customers or their designers are not within our library. It would most likely violate copyright law or our licenses to use these fonts unless we are reproducing non-editable files. Since using non-editable files is not always a reasonable alternative for our customers, we have contacted many of you to assist us in identifying the fonts you are using so that we can secure the appropriate licenses. In this way, we are protecting both you, our customer, and Tatex from liability for copyright infringement and breach of our font licenses.
We know that our customers rely on us to provide them with information relevant to our industry and expect us to assist them in assuring that all aspects of our business relation are conducted in compliance with the law and the highest ethical standards. We will continue to strive to meet and exceed your expectations in this and every other matter you entrust to us.
Sincerely,
Tatex Thermographers