Where should font licenses be embedded?

Question

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?

Answer 1

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).

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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)