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by csinchok 4859 days ago
I get that this was rushed, etc. But it's not like you did a soft launch to test this thing out, or that you're on some kind of deadline here. You built the site lazily and rudely (in my opinion), and then immediately began promotion of it.

Also, you state that you only spent a few hours, and that "most of that time was spent playing with caching and deployment". If you were spending time making sure that the site was cached and performant, it seems less like the hotlinking was an oversight, and more like it was something you just didn't care about.

If you would have taken another few hours, made sure that your ducks were in a row, and THEN began promoting it, you'd be in much better shape right now, and I wouldn't be commenting here.

As for the circles, if you don't know anyone on the dev team, why are you repeatedly claiming to have a tacit OK from us?

As to the fonts, I want to be clear: your current use of the fonts is infringement. We have paid to license those fonts for use on our site. You have not done this, and so you're now infringing--not against us, but against the owners of those fonts. We're not going to come after you, I'd bet that someone will (eventually).

To summarize my position again: I'm not at all a fan of how you went about doing this, but it's honestly not a huge deal—just a bit rude.

1 comments

Well it sounds like at this point an apology is the best I can offer, as what is done is done -- Sorry! If you or anyone on your team is ever in Boston I'll gladly buy you a beer!
You might want to at least fix the font thing. Sounds like you could get in a lot of trouble.
I'll be looking into it -- if it is copyright infringement I believe this is fair use (parody, non-profit, academic, etc.). If it isn't fair use than this is actually a really interesting part of copyright law (e.g. using a premium font will make it more difficult for others to perform satire on your work).
I'm not a lawyer but I think it only would be parody if you were parodying the font itself. As the onion guys said, they had to license it.
It is totally possible! Anyway, fonts have been removed in the name of being on the safe side.