On July 2, 2026, K.S. Park, Director of Open Net Korea, participated in a KrIGF session to discuss copyright issues surrounding Metric Compatible Fonts (MCF).
MCF refers to font files designed to have the same shapes and metrics as paid fonts so that documents created with proprietary font files can be opened with open-source software without disrupting line breaks or formatting. To achieve this, the numerical metrics used by a paid font file for font rendering must be entered accurately. In other words, the process does not involve copying the font file itself, but rather collecting the various numerical values embedded in a proprietary font and inputting them when creating a new font file.
Inputting such numerical values does not, in itself, constitute copyright infringement. This conclusion is even more strongly supported by the Supreme Court's INI file decisions (Supreme Court decisions of October 27, 2014, 2013Da74998 and 2013Da75007), which indicate that inputting numerical values itself does not constitute copyright infringement. However, font companies sometimes include provisions in their End User License Agreements (EULAs) prohibiting the use of such metrics. The legal validity and enforceability of these non-disclosure or confidentiality clauses therefore remain an unresolved issue.
The session was introduced as follows:
This session examines attempts to achieve "public-interest but legally uncertain" interoperability in Korea's public-document ecosystem. It focuses on three concrete cases: (1) the rHWP project, which temporarily suspended its HWPX file-saving functionality on May 12, 2026; (2) the legal gray area surrounding font EULAs and copyright in connection with the Metric Compatible Font generator, Polaris MCFG, released by Polaris Office; and (3) the allocation of responsibility for fonts and formatting in official documents generated by AI/LLMs.
These issues are not merely questions of document formats. They are closely connected to core internet governance issues, including open standards, multi-stakeholder infrastructure, universal accessibility, digital public goods, and AI governance.
Following the presentations, the session will be conducted as a roundtable discussion with the audience, with the goal of developing an outline for a "Korean prior legal certainty mechanism," similar to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's No-Action Letter system. The final five minutes will be devoted to separately documenting and organizing areas of consensus and disagreement.
The outcomes of the session will be incorporated into a draft policy proposal report following the conclusion of KrIGF and will serve as the basis for further work with the open-source HWP/X developer community.
◎ Panelists
■ Moderator: Minseok Jang, Senior Researcher, Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI)
■ Discussants:
- Youngkwan Kim, rHWP Maintainer — Open Source
- Haeseok Lee, CTO, Polaris Office — Commercial / Open Source
- Hojun Lee, Dong-Eui University — Youth / Open Source
- Hyunje Park, Distinguished Professor, School of Software, Hallym University — Academia
- K.S. Park, Director, Open Net — Legal (Online)
- Hyunyoung Kim, Vice President, Boin Information Technology — Standards
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