[jmathai]

Received DMCA takedown notices for a paid font I used for my wife’s interior design website that she liked but we didn’t pay for because…I’m lazy.

I was surprised to receive the DMCA (it is hosted on GitHub Pages). I ignored the emails because…I’m lazy.

They (GitHub) eventually took down the repository (and site). So I swapped to another font and I don’t think my wife noticed.

I think all of this was still easier than probably paying for the font!

Lesson of the story? Don’t underestimate the impact of laziness on your potential customers.

[detritus]

Out of interest, did you rename the font prior to use? I'm curious how they found it.

You can also just stick them in a font-editor and re-export "as your own font" with some minor tweaks. Not that you should, of course.

[iamcalledrob]

You really should pay, especially for work by small foundries.

Making a typeface takes a tremendous amount of work. The financial upside is extremely hard to justify.

I think non-designers underestimate the amount of effort required by an order of magnitude. I put it in the territory of building indie games. Potentially years of your life go into it, and it's a huge problem if everyone pirates your work.

[detritus]

I'm actually a designer, have paid for many fonts - including licenses for websites - have made a couple myself and have a good idea how hard they are to make.

That said, a certain corporation's bought up a load of fonts made over the past x decades and is making a tidy sum selling old rope again and again without adding anything of value, or funding the original designers/converters, so I'm quite happy to illuminate how an individual can get around such things for use on their personal blog with an audience of ten, should they so wish.

.

ed - you're also not as likely to be able to get a whole usable font from a small foundry in the first place, without buying it.

[ryandrake]

Fonts are (simplifying greatly) just code, right? I wonder when AI models will be able to cleanroom-clone the general look of a font without violating the copyright on the official version's underlying code.

[xigoi]

An important part of a font is kerning. I’m guessing that LLMs would be really bad at kerning because they don’t have visual intuition.

[miguel-muniz]

I do a bit of graphic design for friends and family and am more than willing to spend like up to $100 on a nice typeface from smaller creators. It's just unfortunate many professional typefaces from the big foundries will charge you thousands of dollars for an entire family with strict usage limits. Like I'm just trying to make some holiday cards...

I get that they're trying to make their ROI back from enterprise customers who can justify paying thousands a month for their specific corporate font, but I would like to see more personal use, project based pricing that's affordable for hobbyist use

[argee]

+1 — "just being lazy" is no excuse when you can just ask your LLM of choice for a free font recommendation similar to what you can't afford. If you absolutely can't live without using the paid font, of course you should pay for it!

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>You really should pay, especially for work by small foundries.

You can't copyright the alphabet.

>and it's a huge problem if everyone pirates your work.

I've never pirated a font. Not once have I boarded a ship in the middle of the ocean, gun in hand, taking the crew and cargo of typography hostage.

But more seriously, I acknowledge that it's a problem. It's just not my problem.

[an-honest-moose]

>You can't copyright the alphabet.

You're not paying to use the alphabet, there are plenty of perfectly legible typefaces that are completely free for you to use.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

You can't copyright basic geometric shapes either.

>there are plenty of perfectly legible typefaces that are completely free for you to use.

You mean there are plenty of bezier curved shapes which are within the public domain and no one can stop me. I'm not obligated to surrender my rights so you can turn typography into a business model. If you piss me off, I might just release tools that even stooges can use that copy the shapes out of the otf file, rearrange those completely so that no file fingerprinting will match, and has the user rename the files. I will go to war.

[dhosek]

Legally, typeface designs do not receive protection (which is based on idiotic declarations like “you can’t copyright the alphabet”) but digital font files are considered programs and thus are able to be protected as IP.¹ You can try to justify the theft to yourself but somewhere there’s an individual (or on some occasions many individuals) who spent a long time making decisions about how that typeface should look and choosing the best points to turn it into splines to describe the shape and you decided that your laziness trumps their work.

⸻

1. I would note that bitmap fonts do not receive the same protection as Type 1 or OTF fonts.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>there are plenty of perfectly legible typefaces that are completely free for you to use.

Legally based off the carefully considered positions of philosophers of law like Thomas Jefferson, and others just as renowned, who actually created modern copyright law in the United States, because they weren't trying to set you up to be rent-seeking degenerate scribblers for the next umpteen millennia.

>but digital font files are considered programs

As precedented in case law by degenerate judges who should be brought up on treason charges. They aren't programs in any meaningful sense, culinary recipes are likely closer to programs (they, arguably, run on a Turing-complete machine, the human brain, and have something akin to branching going on once in awhile).

>You can try to justify the theft

What theft? No theft occurred, because I denied no one the possession of their own property. Even the judges and lawyers have to admit that this is at most infringement, so please use that word or just confess here and now that you'rea manipulative liar.

>I would note that bitmap fonts do not receive the same protection as Type 1 or OTF fonts.

What!?!?! Those aren't programs too? Please, consult the computer scientists, they must be informed! Are they also not stored as ones and zeroes?

[anonymous_user9]

Type 1 fonts are PostScript programs, while OTF and TTF fonts use a turing-complete virtual machine to control hinting, ligatures, etc.

[dhosek]

You think a bitmap is a program?

I do not argue with idiots.

[jmathai]

I did not - I wasn't trying to evade - I was just being lazy.

I do believe whoever the font owners are paying just scrape the HTML and CSS looking for patterns matching their font.