»Typograf« publisher Neuber fakes font downloads and advertises illegal font downloads

Lars Schwarz
Lars Schwarz Posts: 114
in Type Business
This is a really questionable business practice IMHO:

free-fonts dot com is a website operated by »Neuber Software« (publisher of »Typograf«, a commercial font viewer for Windows). 

First of all it creates »fake/SEO content« by suggesting it offers free downloads to the respective fonts by saying »The best website for free high-quality Proxima Nova fonts, with 26 free Proxima Nova fonts for immediate download, ...« and it also has a »Relevant Web pages about ...« section that includes links to actual illegal download sites (not in all cases, but for some). 

Proxima Nova is just an example here, you can actually use any other font name, Gotham, Helvetica or any other commercial font that is in their database.

You might want to check their website if it includes any of your work listed and then may ask them to remove it ... 

Comments

  • JoyceKetterer
    JoyceKetterer Posts: 813
    I saw them in  google results but since they don't actually have a download of our  font I thought we couldn't do anything.  You're  getting results just from them using the name?

  • Lars Schwarz
    Lars Schwarz Posts: 114
    Even though they don't offer downloads, on one hand it makes users think they do, because of the wording they use ("... 26 free Proxima Nova fonts for immediate download") plus they do have links to illegal font downloads in their "Relevant Web pages about ..." section (for the Proxima Nova example they list a site called "social fonts", which offers a direct download). 

    It's kinda bad SEO tricks only, however due to the domain name and the fact it's been around for some time they rank pretty good for some common Google queries and to me this is like "fake news" for fonts.

Categories