If I use a commercial font as part of my website design, I am in fact publishing that font on my site and anyone can obtain a copy of it -- in fact, they automatically do merely by visiting my site! Does this mean all my visitors are "pirating"? Of course not. Github may make the font more accessible/searchable, but that doesn't change anything about the copyright status of the font.<p>Me publishing something on Github does not grant everyone free rights to it -- in fact, copyright law says no one has rights to it unless I <i>specifically</i> grant those rights. This is most commonly done with a LICENSE file. The copyright rules apply to everything in the repository, including my code, and any fonts, icons or stock images. The fact something is on Github (or the internet, in general) doesn't make it public domain, you still have to abide by the license terms.<p>While I think the suggestion that "on github" = "piracy" is stupid, I could see a couple things that could apply:<p>(1) If the license for the font explicitly states it's for "use" or "distribution" on a single domain. Unless the license is clear about it, it'd really be up to lawyers to argue over whether hosting the code in a public repository on Github can be considered "use" or "distribution" -- and ultimately that argument is about one non-authenticating public URL being okay while another non-authenticating public URL is not.<p>(2) If I've put a commercial font in my repository along with a typical LICENSE file containing MIT/GPL/BSD/whatever without explicitly stating the fonts are not under that license, then I'm basically mis-representing the license for that font (which I should not be allowed to do).<p>Given that putting a font on Github is technically no different from publishing on my site in terms of someone being able to 'pirate' it, personally I think a Github repository with a proper license (not doing (2)) is fine, because the LICENSE file effectively says it's <i>not</i> okay to just copy that font.
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.
Wait until they find out that when people visit the finished website in their browser, it will download the font! Oh the piracy!<p>Just like in the real world, someone handing you the keys to their car doesn't mean you own it.
Funny story, I was working with an enterprise-sized company, a major telcom, and we found out that we had used the "wrong" version of the font everywhere. The original font was like "My Font" and the font we had used was the "Pro My Font" that had a bunch of extra symbols and such in it and was higher-priced. But we used it everywhere, for years. And it would have been a huge hassle to change it all. So we emailed the designer and were like, "Look, we didn't intend to screw you, but we also didn't really budget the $450k in estimated licenses we'd need here... how about we pay you like $30k extra and call it good?"<p>Anyway, long story short, the small-time designer guy was thrilled to get $30k, and turns out he wasn't at all even monitoring for pirated versions of his font anywhere... he didn't have any idea who had bought his font, so to him it was just some random big company offering to give him free money. The places that sell fonts should do a better job of passing on payment (obviously) to designers, but also a list of who bought their fonts so they can take some pride in knowing where their designs are being used.
Interestingly, typefaces are not copyrightable in the US, though fonts, being computer code, can be. Not sure how this influences the situation, though.
What a depressing thread. The general consensus (at the time of submitting this comment) is that posters don't care if commercial fonts are hosted on GitHub in violation of their licence.<p>Many professional fonts are the work of a single type designer who may have spent thousands of hours creating the typeface. Modern typefaces can have a dozen or more weights and hundreds of glyphs.<p>It's hard work and time-consuming to create a professional type family. It's depressing to come here and see how little people care for the work of other professions.
I've been doing this for years -- Its a PIA dealing with each font foundry's DRM system and getting it to work on my local dev environment. When I go live, I deal with it but its also such a hassle to get clients to pay for a font, give me the required info to use the foundry's DRM, etc. I bet if a foundry used an honor system (give fonts away for free, charge a per-site license for commercial use) they'd still make a profit and not have to deal with complex DRM systems (and make it more likely for designers and developers to use their fonts).
I'm guilty of having searched GitHub's repositories for fonts I like. Using them for personal projects and wouldn't mind paying for a license if I end up loving it.<p>Though, it begs the question: who and how will find out that you simply borrowed the font?
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]<p>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."<p>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.<p>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]<p>[1] <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20100522133154/http://lw.bna.com/lw/19980303/9520710.htm" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20100522133154/http://lw.bna.com...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Systems,_Inc._v._Southern_Software,_Inc" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Systems,_Inc._v._Souther...</a>.<p>[3] <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/20050425novalis" rel="nofollow">https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/20050425novalis</a>
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.
Yeah I'm a big fan of people's dotfile directories for trying out fonts. I remember some HN discussion about a proprietary font that was pretty good for programming. I was on the fence on whether or not I wanted it, just by looking at screenshots. So I used Github search to find someone that dumped it in their home directory, downloaded it, and tried it out. I hated it! So I saved money thanks to this piracy. (I use Iosevka now. Wow it's good.)
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).
I get why they're worried but really the problem started with web fonts.<p>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.<p>It doesn't really matter if it's committed to public github.
This is kind of an adjacent question, and likely a very basic one, but if I wanted to avoid linking out to a web font repository by properly licensing one and self-hosting it, what even <i>is</i> the correct procedure?
Why not fetch the fonts from the source they list as a part of the build process?<p>That way you aren't distributing but pointing the interested ones to the source website.<p>Or am I missing anything here?
Is this "piracy" in the sense of Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean?"<p>Like, Github is taking an niche subject matter, packaging it up for a more general audience, and then distributing it worldwide?