[Historiopode]

It seems to me that downloading a subset of a typeface from a webpage would be less practical than downloading an entire collection from a torrent.

Concerning the service itself: according to their product page, H&FJ requires you to include a remote stylesheet rather than javascript. I would say this is the "minimum viable evil" if you are striving to centralize distribution of your webfonts; while annoying, there are some advantages for the user (in this case, free Akamai).

Edit: I just checked a couple of torrent search engines and, apparently, there are not many up-to-date torrents for H&FJ typefaces. In hindsight, I suppose that the population of individuals who are likely to share files illegally and that of professional/dedicated designers have very little overlap.

[tptacek]

The people who download fonts from torrents know what they're doing. If it was trivial to copy fonts off of web pages, people would routinely violate H+FJ's license without even realizing it; H+FJ would be in the unpleasant position of having to police the Internet and educating all those people who'd be surprised to hear that the one piece of markup / technology they can't crib from another site is the font, but only if it's an H+FJ font, and...

[mkehrt]

I may or may not have had no trouble whatsoever pirating an enormous variety of fonts off a website I found with a quick google search. Maybe torrents just aren't where they are?

[praxeologist]

In my experience too, websites with direct downloads are better. It is easy to make webfonts even when FontSquirrel marks the font for copyright too if you have a software like FontLab. Just remove the designer/copyright information in the Font Info menu.