I’m looking for a font to use in page headings on a site. I have the perfect font on a CD, but the licence long pre-dates @font-face Web fonts, and makes no mention of using the fonts on Web sites. Presumably I need explicit permission to use the font in this way? The CD dates from 1995 and as far as I’m aware, the company which produced it (Softkey) no longer exists, so requesting permission is not an option.
The copyright is still in force and will be for decades. Somebody owns the assets of the defunct business. Odds are nobody will ever know you are using their font and no adverse action will be taken against you. SoftKey is one of the examples of the late 1990s technology bubble. Who owns the copyright to the font now may never be known for sure.
If I had to guess who owned the copyright today, I would guess Riverdeep. Unless they sold it.
Off Topic:
I would suggest you upload examples of the font to the whatthefont service and find similar ones. There are lots of fonts that are ready for use on the web, and there are only so many variations. I’d also prefer to use fonts that are prepared for the web, as it’s not a great idea just to use fonts created for desktop. You can run them through the fontsquirrel service, of course, but that would be a last resort for me.
Thanks - that’s pretty much what I thought. It doesn’t really matter whether anybody else would know I was using it without permission; I would know, and I wouldn’t be happy with that.
Well of course, now you mention it, that’s the obvious solution. 
(Some days I really think I shouldn’t be out on my own. :o) I’ve always associated whatthefont with this thread, and since that’s in Graphics, whatthefont=“fonts for use with Photoshop”. 
I am a Bear of Very Little Brain - and I’m away to lie down in a darkened room.
Yes, I somewhat hesitated to suggest it, too, as I’m not sure that would be my first option. On reflection, what I usually do is google something like “font similar to xyz-font”. Often, you’ll find that the issue has already been discussed somewhere, although that might not be the case for an old font on a disk.
The other thing you can do is go to sites like Google Fonts, Font squirrel etc. and look through the fonts they have until you find one that’s similar.
But thinking about it now, it might be simpler to upload a screenshot sample to whatthefont after all!
I did have the gumption to try Font Squirrel, but couldn’t find anything remotely similar. Whatthefont produced an almost exact match - not free, but at a very reasonable price.
(I’ve never really had cause to use @font-face until very recently, and all of a sudden I seem to need it for every site I work on. My brain is still catching up. 
)
Yes, it can be rather fun. It also tends not to be done in the best way, though. I recommend you read this article: http://www.fontspring.com/support/installing_webfonts/style-linking
It shows how to avoid a problem I used to have with @font-face, where you use (for example) an italic font with font-style set to normal but then your fallback font is not going to be italic.
Thanks. I will if I can. At the moment, I just keep getting the message that “Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at [noparse]www.fontspring.com[/noparse]”. 
Seems like their site was down for a while, but it’s back up now.
So it is. Helpful article, thank you.