Github became the web's largest font piracy site (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: Github became the web's largest font piracy site (2017)

#141

Post by jzunit » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 4:43 PM UTC

Brendinooo wrote: post #124

jzunit wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the people who are taking your fonts are also making a product. We understand the need to make a living and the difficulty of making a product. I hope you get paid for what you do but you don't get to decide the market size for your product when it is a digital good. The market does. There is a market for paid specialty fonts used on a website. People should pay for that. However, there is not much of a marke…

> You don't get to decide the market size for your product when it is a digital good. The market does. "It's easy for me to acquire content against the content creator's wishes, therefore I should dictate the market." > There is not much of a market for paid fonts used in Sketch when developers and designers are testing out different concepts they MIGHT use in production. Never said there was. There's an easy solutio…

The reality is that most people like myself are continue to do this regardless of your morality rant. The problem is that your morality argument is based on licensing terms and the legal system. The internet has its own morality that is somewhat untethered to legality: use what you can get, pay for what you feel you should. You can claim that this violates copyright or morality but people vote with their clicks and git clones - there is nothing you can do to change that.

And you can scream and write these type of blog posts all you want but really it just ads to the Streisand effect. You think this blog post net increased or decreased the awareness and use of github as a source of fonts?

Re: Github became the web's largest font piracy site (2017)

#142

Post by Brendinooo » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 5:23 PM UTC

jzunit wrote: post #141

Brendinooo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't get to decide the market size for your product when it is a digital good. The market does. "It's easy for me to acquire content against the content creator's wishes, therefore I should dictate the market." > There is not much of a market for paid fonts used in Sketch when developers and designers are testing out different concepts they MIGHT use in production. Never said there was. There's an easy solutio…

The reality is that most people like myself are continue to do this regardless of your morality rant. The problem is that your morality argument is based on licensing terms and the legal system. The internet has its own morality that is somewhat untethered to legality: use what you can get, pay for what you feel you should. You can claim that this violates copyright or morality but people vote with their clicks and g…

> The internet has its own morality that is somewhat untethered to legality: use what you can get, pay for what you feel you should.

I see you chose more of a passive tone here, as though you're just a cog in the machine, totally helpless and unable to take action on your own.

The Internet is what people make of it, in part based on the sum of individual choices.

> And you can scream

Not screaming.

> it just ads to the Streisand effect

Possibly. Maybe it alerts GitHub devs to the problem and they try to come up with a solve. If font creators read it, they can work with repo owners to get things in order. For my part, it pointed out a problem that I can take steps to mitigate in the future with my own repos.

Anyways, obviously I can't stop you or anyone else from taking digital goods at will. But in part, I wish that people would be more transparent about their motives instead of talking themselves into thinking that they're not actually doing something wrong.

Just say "I take things that don't belong to me because I deserve to have them, it's easy to do so, and I won't get in trouble". At least it'd be an honest assessment.

Re: Github became the web's largest font piracy site (2017)

#143

Post by cogburnd02 » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 10:06 PM UTC

Let's all just take a moment to remember that the design of fonts (in the US) is NOT copyrightable. The only reason vector fonts are copyrightable at all is a raging dumpster-fire called Adobe v Southern. [1] [2]

The case itself says this: "defendants contend that the numerical reference points that define an outline of a glyph are unprotectable as a matter of law" but then "the court finds that the Adobe font software programs are protectable original works of authorship."

Note: when they say "font software programs" here, they simply mean a vector (say, ttf) font file rather than a bitmap (say, bdf or pcf) font file.

David 'Novalis' Turner probably put it best when he wrote this: "A font face -- that is, the look of a font, is not copyrightable... But font 'programs' (truetype fonts, for example) are. Another ruling has extended the definition of 'programs' to include certain outline data. Why this outline data is not equivalent to a font face, nobody knows." [3]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20100522133154/http://lw.bna.com...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Systems,_Inc._v._Souther....

[3] https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/20050425novalis

Re: Github became the web's largest font piracy site (2017)

#144

Post by tripzilch » Fri, Jul 19, 2019, 1:58 PM UTC

I get why they're worried but really the problem started with web fonts.

The font file is published on the web page itself, just like the images, CSS, etc. So everybody could already grab it from the web page itself, and in fact this is what the browser does automatically, in order to render the font. It's the whole point.

It doesn't really matter if it's committed to public github.

Re: Github became the web's largest font piracy site (2017)

#145

Post by bryanrasmussen » Wed, Jul 31, 2019, 9:00 PM UTC

roywiggins wrote: post #139

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if the license explicitly forbids it you better not do it as I noted above. but if the license does not explicitly forbid then I think you have an argument that putting your website code on github is pretty common practice.

By default you don't have any distribution rights at all . None. You just have a bare font file that you can't share with anyone else. That's not very useful, so the license says "you may distribute this font file as part of a website; you must be using this font to style a webpage. Any other kind of distribution at all is still prohibited." There's no "common practice" exception- just because they open up a little w…

well I'm not a lawyer, and my American business law classes I took are now more than 20 years ago, but as I recall there are common practice defenses if those practices are in relation to something the contract allows you to do.

So the argument would go as follows:

the contract says "you may distribute this font file as part of a website; you must be using this font to style a webpage. Any other kind of distribution at all is still prohibited."

We have used this font to style a webpage, as is industry practice we have placed the font in our site code, which is stored on github, which is also the most widely used tool for distributing website code. The website code must be distributed in order for the purpose of the license to be fulfilled - obviously the font cannot be distributed as part of a website if the website itself is not distributed.

At that point the court will have to determine what distribution of a website means, if the font to be distributed as part of the website means that the website will need to be distributed, and if github is so commonly used that the license giver neglecting to mention it have given tacit approval to its usage.

Aside from all this if one wanted to contest the issue the court would have to determine if the font being in your github repository is you distributing it just because someone else can fork it. For another silly analogy, just because you put your beer on the table, walked outside, and a kid came in and drank the beer, doesn't mean you sold liquor to a minor.

Perhaps I'm wrong but it doesn't seem as open and shut as everyone wants to argue, unless there is specific prohibition of github in the license in which case there is no longer a case to be made.