Font Radar, "Find where your fonts are used and retrieve illegal licenses"

Roel Nieskens · January 2022

Font Radar scans more than 20k new websites every day and monitors 98 000 fonts from 650 foundries worldwide.
Our proprietary algorithm will identify if your fonts are used on any of them. Even if the font file is renamed, the metadata cleared, or even the character table subsetted, we'll still be able to identify your fonts.

We'll help you contact the website creators/owners to check licenses' validity and try to find an arrangement if you witness an infraction.

If the violators don't want to settle, we'll work with your lawyers (or provide one) to bring it to the court.

https://www.fontradar.com/

I came across this project but can't find any information about it. Is anybody here familiar with it?

Having dabbled with something similar, I'm impressed by them having access to nearly 100.000 fonts. The scanning and fingerprinting are relatively straightforward from a technical perspective, but to recognise a font you'd have to somehow compare it to the original font. I figured if 650 foundries would be in on this, there'd be more to be found about this project online.

I see the address is the same as Font Ninja, https://www.fonts.ninja/, so my guess is they're sharing the library.

Is anyone here sharing their fonts? Or have an idea of how effective this service is? On paper it looks like something many folks here would appreciate, after reading about previous projects like TypeSnitch on this forum.

Paulo Goode · January 2022

Hi Roel, yes, I am using Font Radar with all its capabilities. It is very effective at seeking sites that use your fonts – it is particularly good when discovering fonts that have been renamed to (attempt to) avoid licensing them legally. I have also been amazed at the amount of OTF fonts that are uploaded to websites.

Font Radar also makes it very easy to contact these individuals and companies so that you can discuss correcting their font licensing. You can keep track of cases easily and filter out legitimate instances swiftly. The whole site is beautifully put together and works efficiently and effectively. Once you are in dialogue with an individual or company, I have found that they either remove the fonts or obtain a licence within 24 hours.

I would recommend Font Radar to every type designer and foundry.

Axel CORJON · January 2022

Hi!

Thanks @Paulo Goode

@Roel Nieskens let me know if you have any questions, I'll be glad to answers them (althought I won't be able to share all our tricks

)

Johannes Neumeier · January 2022

@Axel CORJON Seeing this black box, what questions could anyone possibly have...

RichardW · January 2022

Is Font Radar just a tool for collecting email addresses? I followed the link with a view to monitoring partial clones of my fonts or finding out how much it would cost, and I couldn't get past a request for my email address.

John Hudson · January 2022

I’ve been in contact with Alex, and have viewed a video explaining their service. I can sort of see why they don’t just make the information public: they provide a service that helps foundries to identify unlicensed usage and pursue DMCA notices and/or payment, so explaining in public how they do that might provide clues to others how to avoid such detection. This is a service specifically for foundries, so it makes sense that it is communicated only and directly to foundries.

Roel Nieskens · January 2022

@Paulo Goode Thanks, your raving review convinced me to pull the plug on my own project ;-) Sounds like they're doing a great job!

@Axel CORJON No need to share the secret sauce, I understand. I guess I was mostly wondering if I was reading a fantastic promo blurb, or if this service works as advertised. Kudos for setting up something as big as this. As a web developer, I hope you can find a way to share some anonymised stats. I'm sure you can provide lots of insights in font piracy.

Johannes Neumeier · January 2022

John Hudson said:

they provide a service that helps foundries to identify unlicensed usage and pursue DMCA notices and/or payment, so explaining in public how they do that might provide clues to others how to avoid such detection

Not sure I agree. Either it works or it doesn't; being obscure about their approach doesn't ensure it works.

Also, I think it's not required to disclose technical details while still being upfront about some key aspects. Like, for example, who runs the service.

Axel CORJON · January 2022

@Johannes Neumeier

We do not hide who's running the service. Font Radar is owned and run by our company (Emdash) and built internally only using our solutions.

fontradar.com is just a temporary website. For now, it's invitation-based only, but any foundry who wants to know more can contact me and I'll happily share more info (@John Hudson is right, I don't want to share a video of Font Radar on a public forum though)

In a nutshell, Font Radar is a platform that finds websites using your fonts (with a highly accurate custom algorithm) and provides a whole CRM to contact website owners and help you correct license infringements.

There's a lot to say about the features (screenshots, proof of use, database sync, threat levels, automatic follow-up, dynamic email templates, traffic estimation, etc.) but I don't think it's the best place to describe everything.

There's also a DMCA takedown tool in development, but it's not done yet (we're behind schedule on it as we focused more on improving the part of the tool that is helping foundries sell back licenses).

@Roel Nieskens
I would love to, I'll work on it later this year and share what I can.

I'm waiting to have more data to compile and share. So far it can vary a lot from one foundry to another (self-distributed, Adobe Font distribution, MyFonts, etc..).

What I can tell you so far is that we experience licensing infringements on 25% to 50% of the websites we flag.

Roel Nieskens · January 2022

Axel CORJON said:

What I can tell you so far is that we experience licensing infringements on 25% to 50% of the websites we flag.

The flagged websites are websites using self-hosted webfonts from one of the 650 foundries, I suppose? (As I'm sure at least 50% of newly launched websites use Google Fonts).

Axel CORJON · January 2022

It's only for commercial self-hosted fonts. I'm excluding open-source fonts, free fonts, google fonts, and other cloud solutions (Adobe Font, Rentafont, Fontstand, etc.).

It's a rough estimate based on several foundries using Font Radar.

Google fonts are present on 54% of websites (self-hosted and cloud), sometimes they're also a commercial font. Google fonts represent 65% of the webfonts we identify.