101–110 of 145 posts
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Not if you're a font designer or type foundry.
There are enough fonts. It wouldn't be a great loss for humanity if we didn't get as many new fonts because of decreased profit margins in the font design industry.
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Yikes. You ever try making a font? Do you know how many hours it takes and what kind of profit margins you're eating into?
The profit margins we are eating into is exactly ZERO. Why? because if most of the time i need to actually pay for it, i'll just use the cheaper alternative: Google Fonts. There will be times when I need to use this font and make something that will go live. That's the time to buy a font. If font making is not profitable, then don't make fonts.
Someone is making a product and telling you what you can and cannot do with it, and then you decide that none of that applies to you, because...I don't know, you're entitled to use it if you happen to see it?
"There will be times when I need to use this font and make something that will go live. That's the time to buy a font." - that depends on the license that the font foundry grants you.
"If font making is not profitable [due to lost sales via piracy], then don't make fonts"...some kind of mental gymnastics there. "I will take freely from you and if you can't afford to let me do that, it's your fault for making it in the first place" is a tough ground to stand on.
What's the difference between putting webfonts on your public website vs putting them on your public github? This seems like a distinction that only lawyers would care about, but I'm not a web developer (and I don't know much about webfonts) so maybe there's something I'm missing.
As you suspect, there is no practical difference. The difference being perceived is that when you put them on your website, you're doing that for the purpose of displaying text using the font, whereas when you put them on github, the purpose of github is file sharing. The first purpose is good, the second purpose is bad, so the first use should be allowed and the second use shouldn't be, even though -- technically -- they are exactly the same thing. That's just a detail; they're spiritually different.
Unfortunately, this point of view is very much not limited to lawyers; it is how most people think about most things.
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The intent often matters, but there's clearly a huge difference between your example of a "download here!" link and usage on either a website or within a GH-hosted repo. When you say 'the right to serve the font from your webserver' -- in this case, 'your webserver' may simply be GitHub's web-server, a service they provide to you as part of your payment to them (either because it's part of the app you host on GH, or…
The license I linked expressly forbids "distribution of the fonts through file sharing services and online version control repositories accessible by the public" It would be the same if you publicly hosted a zip file containing your site's contents, including the fonts. Or offered an open read-only FTP account to your /web/ directory. Or any number of ways to make the font available publicly that isn't via a web brow…
In that case, it seems as though the rights-owner should simply take the standard route (even if suboptimal) to enforce their rights -- given the volume, they could likely work out a much better way to protect their IP (or automate it, in the worst case).
I'd be a little bit surprised if they cared a whole lot, given that finding the fonts is trivial for the reasons stated above. Almost comes across blog-spammy at that point, heh.
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There are enough fonts. It wouldn't be a great loss for humanity if we didn't get as many new fonts because of decreased profit margins in the font design industry.
There are enough . It wouldn't be a great loss for humanity if we didn't get as many new fonts because of decreased profit margins in the font design industry.
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Edit- Also a fun old quiz that helps beg the question, do you really need to add a fancy font over a system font? - http://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/
I fully support your point—many times there are free or system fonts that are at least as of high quality. That said I only missed MATTEL on that one. Helv has a few giveaways and refinements but most people don't care—though the differences Arial and other modified Helveticas do have arguably render the type less neutral.
I got MATTEL and TOYOTA both right based on the heuristic "Helvetica apparently has fatter lines", which I learned from the quiz itself.
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Accidentally exposing a folder of copyrighted font files over FTP would probably technically violate the license, even if it was by accident. You're serving the files outside of the licensed use (serving and rendering a webpage). Same as if you accidentally exposed to the internet your home server of legally-created DVD backups. You'd still be violating the license under which you bought the DVDs.
Show me an attorney willing to pursue accidental violators for damages, especially when the asset in question is intended to be publicly served in the course of its use. I would genuinely be interested in case law's stance on this. Also interested in what happens to the value of non-public domain fonts if you require the digital asset to be handled as a secret (and all of the hassle that goes along with that).
Why would anyone use a non-public domain / CC / open source font in a publicly available project? If the project has an open source license and is in a public repository on Github, why would there even been non-public resources (fonts, icons, images, etc) in the repository at all?
If you have any private resources (code or otherwise) in the repository, it shouldn't be in a public repo to begin with.
Are there any examples of open source projects that are including commercially licensed fonts?
Github is home to a ton of pirated content. Including closed source binaries repackaged in violation of the publishers' licenses. But Github won't do anything unless the copyright-holder submits a DMCA takedown notice.
Could you imagine an upload filter or moderation queue before you were allowed to push code to GitHub?
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There are enough fonts. It wouldn't be a great loss for humanity if you weren't able to use one you didn't pay for.
How do you know if someone using a font in their github repo paid for it or not?
I could see this happening in a repo by Google/MS/FB/etc., but it probably would be extremely expensive for them. Any other instance of this sort of sharing is unlikely enough that it can be assumed to be illegitimate.
I've always found it interesting how the term "piracy" has been mostly unquestioningly accepted by the media as the appropriate term to use for copying, which arguably doesn't steal anything (unlike what has traditionally been known as piracy before the digital age).
Not that I don't think the foundries should get paid for their work - I don't have a fully formed opinion on this. But there is a definite upside to sharing information freely, and this is better than mere copying.