Comment by pelagic_sky
1 day ago
Very early in my design education (late 90's) I was taught that fonts are fonts and the more you have, the better you tool set would be. As a graphic designer I definitely made things with fonts I had downloaded. It wasn't till I got my first serious design job at an agency where I quickly learned about purchasing and licensing fonts. Even if I could "find" a missing font, I wasn't allowed to use it. We needed to get the fonts directly from the vendor we were working with and if they were being too slow, we ate the cost and purchased the font.
It's even harder to get away with pirating fonts now with web fonts. Either the service can detect you pulling a font for a domain that isn't paying for it or webcrawlers will find unpaid fonts.
>> Either the service can detect you pulling a font for a domain that isn't paying for it...
Is that really a thing? Markup in a web page tells how to display the text. Saying "use this font over here on this other server" seems fair game on some level. Might not be on another level, but it's technically the end user downloading a file that's publicly available on some server.
In the USA at least, contributory and vicarious infringement are a thing. Grokster knowingly directed their users to infringing material so they picked up secondary liability.
AIUI the font vendor has a list of customers, each of whom are required to provide an exact list of the domains they will host it on and the domains they will display it on. So the crawlers, upon identifying a matching font, simply have to check that both the displaying and hosting domains match.
A downloadable file can be hosted elsewhere.
"Pulling a font for a domain"—wtf, isn't the client making the request? Why detect anything, just require a referrer on your allow-list, and deny if it's not there.
An allow-list would probably suck for local development for users that do have a valid license.