I did not see any reference to Raphael.js. So I thought I'd include it here. Raphael.js is backwards compatible all the way back to IE5 and a very early Firefox as well as all of the rest of the browsers. It uses SVG when it can and VML when it can not. What you do with it is to draw onto a canvas. Some browsers will even let you select the text that is generated. Raphael.js can be found here:
It can be as simple as creating your paper drawing area, specifying the font, font-weight, size, etc... and then telling it to put your string of text onto the paper. I am not sure if it gets around the licensing issues or not but it is drawing the text so I'm fairly certain it does circumvent the licensing issues. But check with your lawyer to be sure. :-)