A tool that lets you pirate all fonts on any website, instantly.
Comments
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@Lars Schwarz I'd pay several hundred a month for the straight up service at this point. I think you'd need at least 20 customers at that price to justify it?
PS - I'd also pay for your labor as needed to add functionality or target specific projects.0 -
@JoyceKetterer It's scalable at some degree. Basically the more users would commit to use it the lower the costs. Infrastructure became cheaper, so I'd say 5 customers would be a "efficient minimum".
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@JoyceKetterer Side note: this wouldn't include mobile apps, but web only.
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@Ray Larabie MyFonts renders samples using webfonts? Since when? Last time I checked (two minutes ago) they still used images:
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For everyone that said something like "I don't bother" or similar, I'm not a designer and I don't sell licenses, so I have no insights or "feeling" about my work being shared and used for free, but I assume the majority of you guys is aware of sites like <EDITED BY MODERATORS>?
This one, along with others, is around for quite some time now (I don't mean months, but years) and I do see medium sized brands/pages using them as CDN source for webfonts, most likely because they are not aware that this page serves lots of copyrighted material and acts like as if it just is another service like Google Fonts.
IMHO this is an issue.
Everything else is kind of an old story of educating (web)designers about licensing, making trial fonts available for free or not, removing certain glyphs from such fonts or not, using fully equiped web fonts for previews or not and so on.
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I think what bothers me most about this is not so much that it enables an easy method for people to steal fonts (which indeed is nothing new), but how straightforward they are in “educating” people about when it’s okay to steal fonts. Maybe that’s also nothing new, but there’s something about this particular presentation that really rubs me the wrong way.2
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I guess it's because it doesn't scream "attention (and showing tons of weird ads), this is a scammy site" and it's easy to use, just like Google Fonts, pick a font, get a URL, copy+paste, done ...
way easier than reading license agreements, calculating the price for the styles you need, login (forgot the password, request new password), login, checkout, confirm, pay, download, check readme, install. Even good guys are lazy sometimes.2 -
@Lars Schwarz thanks for the sideways plug for e-commerce sites without logins.0
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Please stop posting, mentioning, linking websites that violate font's EULAs or promote piracy.
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@Ramiro Espinoza Ok, kinda weird to discuss piracy w/o it, but ok. In regards to equal treatment you probably want to remove links to Google ttf queries or Github, too
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How many people do you imagine might learn how to steal fonts from this specific thread, in this specific website, and use this knowledge in order to actually steal fonts? I imagine the number is negligeable. On the other hand, it's important that type designers and type-industry people are able to discuss these issues in the open, in order to understand them better and possibly come up with solutions. But it's quite impossible to discuss them without details. I might be wrong, but my guess is that mentioning specific websites here does more good than harm. I'm still just a type-design student, I haven't released anything yet, but once I do, I'd like other type designers to share with me the knowledge of where to look for pirated copies of my fonts, and that would be much less practical if everyone were to stop mentioning such websites here. It's also hard to understand the true scope of the problem without concrete examples.Ramiro Espinoza said:Please stop posting, mentioning, linking websites that violate font's EULAs or promote piracy.6 -
Imagine this: Google positions search results based on, among other factors, the number of links leading to the site. And Typedrawers, believe it or not, has grown to become a respectable source and it often rates high when you enter type-related keywords, so an organic search for "how to steal a font" is likely to end up here as well. You can always ask the OP in a private message.
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@Adam Jagosz That site is in the Google index for years and ranks good w/o any additional keywords, I'd say 1st page for most bad boy queries, besides I guess everyone knows "how to seal a font" ... but, house rules, so ok, done.
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@Adam Jagosz cc @Ray Larabie MyFonts used web fonts when they still offered Typecast and back the days you could easily download their whole library as TTFs.
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@JoyceKetterer I see, thanks for your reply. I only know FontNinja as a "install this webfont you found"-thing, I wasn't aware that it could help you search fonts in use. I'm not familiar with font-specific crawlers (@Lars Schwarz I'd love to hear more about yours!), but would I'm interested to learn how "far" they go. Do they report the CSS name of the font, or is there actual fingerprinting to identify fonts? Or is that a manual step that you need to take?
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@Roel Nieskens I goes as far, not just CSS and fingerprinting.
I never had somehing like a feature list for marketing purposes, because word of mouth, very small niche and such, but I believe there are a few old threads here on TD in regards to TypeSnitch/Fontdata. Otherwise just shot me an email (the one in the TD profile is up to date).
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@Lars Schwarz I saw I tried to email you back in 2018, but to a different address. Tried the one from your profile just now!0
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Who used the "disagree" reaction on my previous comment btw? Someone disagrees with this statement? I had a feature list, it doesn't include fingerprinting or someone disagrees with Roel sending me an email? 🤷♂️😩2
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@Lars Schwarz Indeed. I guess when the froth from the mouth reaches the eyes one can no longer tell what button one is hitting.1
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To be sure, not a single dime was spent nor any meaningful development was performed by Monotype, Google Fonts, Adobe or any major font distributors to prevent or disrupt the ability for font search results on Google to be at minimum down weighted or at best removed via delisting. Conversations without action are just conversations and this one is over a decade old now.3
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@Stuart Sandler Argh! Thanks for reminding me, it was 2011/2012 indeed! 😱
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Not quite. More of a "index of" hack. Just checked it today and still works, as in still can be downloaded, ttf/otf/woff yada yadaRoel Nieskens said:If the Google search hack was doing the "helvetica filetype:ttf" search, that doesn't work anymore. The next best thing, "helvetica inurl:ttf", is semi-thankfully taken over by spam sites.1 -
Stuart Sandler said:To be sure, not a single dime was spent nor any meaningful development was performed by Monotype, Google Fonts, Adobe or any major font distributors to prevent or disrupt the ability for font search results on Google to be at minimum down weighted or at best removed via delisting.
I can see that Google should be expending resources on this, to avoid being sued by Monotype or Adobe. But Google Fonts doesn't have any participation in this conflict, since it doesn't charge money for any of its fonts, and therefore is not subject to losses from piracy.
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@AbiRasheed That query still does expose a lot of fonts indeed, I forgot about that one. All of MyFont's top 10 fonts can be found that way, and much more. Most of the results come from badly configured websites. And while those assets (like fonts) could've trivially been downloaded using the web inspector when actually visiting the site, this now makes them findable through Google.1
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If you are the largest distributors of commercial digital products and what you distribute (on behalf of your clients, that make money from it) can be downloaded easily for free, it's definately something you should look after.John Savard said:I can see that Google should be expending resources on this, to avoid being sued by Monotype or Adobe. But Google Fonts doesn't have any participation in this conflict, since it doesn't charge money for any of its fonts, and therefore is not subject to losses from piracy.
Google cannot be sued by MT or A for being a search engine, but they shouldn't make removing infringing records more complicated than necessary, especially when viewed from their Google Fonts "community approach".
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@John Savard I participate in Google Fonts and am a great fan of @Dave Crossland and the work he has done with the team since it's inception. To echo @Lars Schwarz, as one of the top organizations who supports independent font makers, it would seem trivial they should want to help the community by at minimum supporting our efforts to make delisting a priority to curb the loss of income when a vast majority of Google search results for any font name yield valid resellers near the middle to bottom only below free download sites.To be sure, I don't think they need to do this for fear of being sued so much as a meaningful show of support to the community they're benefitted by as is the case with Adobe and Monotype who specifically generates its income from the sales of fonts and font licensing so why wouldn't they want free commercial font download search results delisted?!?2
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@Stuart Sandler Maybe because certain people believe all fonts should be free... (Nevermind hampering the prospects of designers of minority scripts BTW.) Their heart might be in the right place, but don't let being paid handsomely by them distract you from a stance that you don't believe in.0
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This is probably a topic into which I don’t want to wade too deeply, but... it seems like a complicated and time consuming endeavor. I certainly spent a fair amount of my time trying to address piracy on the Internet, but at Adobe that required carefully identifying specific Adobe IP that was affected (as opposed to a general “this site serves pirated Adobe fonts”), writing it up in detail, and engaging with someone in Legal who had to take it from there. It often worked, but I also know that everyone was stretched thin and addressing these things were often a luxury, considering the whack-a-mole nature of it all.
As for Adobe engaging with Google about it, I honestly can’t remember if that was ever raised. Coming to such an arrangement sounds like a Big Deal, as it would require engagement between the two companies at a relatively senior level, and then taking care to define what should be “delisted” and then of course to implement it. I suppose Google already addresses other kinds of IP (music, video) in some way, but those media are also under the purview of much richer companies with far more resources to dedicate, with more money at stake. (Yes, Adobe’s type business can’t compare to, say, Warner or Disney film and music.)3 -
@Christopher Slye We automated most parts and removing infringing content is luckily regulated by existing laws.
IMHO the majority of illegal uses happens due to ignorance, not due to fraudulent reasons. Those that willingly publish copyrighted material may require a "special treatment", but other cases are often happy to properly license the font after they learned they made a mistake.
As always there are various aspects to this: building a "in use" section (because not every use you are not aware of is illegal of course) or just knowing the stats (you are not required to take action).
There are also 2 different types: those websites that somehow acquired a webfont version of your work w/o licensing it and those sites that offer illegal material for download or web font use. Two types, two different ways to handle them/act on them.
Anyways, for larger companies like Adobe or Monotype this may require some additional legal work, sure, but once the groundwork is layed I'm pretty sure that every designer is happy to know that the distributor takes care of infringements (referring to Monotype/Adobe using such a service themself for monitoring their library).
I guess what Stuart referred to though was larger distributors supporting such a service by sponsoring it to show some "designer love"
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