Fonnts.com free downloads

leksendesign

Has anyone been able to find contact information for Fonnts.com? They are offering a stripped down version of my font for free download and their contact form doesn't have contact information. Thanks!

https://fonnts.com/nordique-pro/

leksendesign

Putting this out here in case anyone else wants to file a complaint:
https://www.name.com/support#abuse

George Thomas

Info is for this company:

Business Profile for Domain Protection Services, Inc.

Registrant:

• Handle: 2
• Name: Redacted For Privacy
• Phone: tel:+1-7208009072
• Kind: individual
• Mailing Address: PO Box 1769, Denver, CO, 80201, US

Thomas Phinney

That looks like it might be a third-party service that helps conceal the actual domain owner.

Igor Petrovic

I blame Google for allowing these sites to appear in its searches even though everybody knows they are piracy sites. Google is the main piracy provider.

James Puckett

Other industries are able to report piracy sites to Google and they get removed from search results. How do we do that?

Ray Larabie

Bing isn't much better. When a font name is searched, it adds some autocomplete choices, nudging people toward piracy. The first three search results for that font are pirate sites, even without the "free download" suffix. Someone who legitimately wants to purchase a font will initially be tantalized with illicit options. It wouldn't be so bad if they had to scroll down a bit to find them.

mitradranirban

Either the piracy sites are doing better SEO optimization than the legitimate foundries or they are providing advertising revenue to the search providers. 
The foundries should pressurise them to at least provide a disclaimer that the font may be copyrighted and the user should check licencing information before use, similar to the one Google show with image search.

jeremy tribby

Igor Petrovic said:

I blame Google for allowing these sites to appear in its searches even though everybody knows they are piracy sites. Google is the main piracy provider.

google does not host pirated font files, and they respond to DMCA complaints. you can initiate the process for getting search results removed on the basis of copyright here. it is not and should not be google's (or any other search engine's) job to police the internet, just to comply with relevant local laws, which they do

Igor Petrovic

Ray Larabie said:

Bing isn't much better.

I agree. Google is not the only, but the biggest piracy provider.

jeremy tribby said:

they respond to DMCA complaints.

I would like to hear a real-life confirmation for this. On the other thread, I posted a question and got no replies:
https://typedrawers.com/discussion/comment/66722#Comment_66722

Also, here we pretend that Google can't tell it's illegal activity.

One should note that Google presents illegal websites at the top of search results while making the process of removal pretty time-consuming, asking for sensitive information, and unclear. I spent a whole day without results.

One creator can not possibly remove all piracy instances, but Google can.

jeremy tribby said:

it is not and should not be google's (or any other search engine's) job to police the internet.

Jeremy, Google is not the dark web. It filters its results based on what they see as a minimum legality threshold. Here we are not talking about moderating opinions but filtering illegal activities. So the keyword is not "legitimate" but "legal".

Also, a note that Google is one of the two biggest players in the font business, so this behavior has direct damage consequences for their competition.

---

Last, but not least, I am not a proponent of anti-piracy inquisition. I understand the role of pirated content as a tool for the poor to get a better life through their effort and knowledge. A lot of us across the world learned to use computers on pirated Windows back in the 90s, and I am very grateful for that. I just question Google's shady role in it.

Simon Cozens

Igor Petrovic said:

 It filters its results based on what they see as a minimum legality threshold.

It's true, there's a guy in Mountain View who looks at all the web sites and checks if they've got anything illegal on them. He's currently on "e"; the problem will be solved when he gets to "f". 🙄

I feel like people who comment on how big Internet companies work really don't understand the concept of "scale". Web indexing is really not human scale, at all - which means that humans don't get to make decisions on individual sites. Just can't happen.

Igor Petrovic

Simon Cozens said:

Web indexing is really not human scale, at all - which means that humans don't get to make decisions on individual sites.

Nobody here expects Google to do anything on the human scale, since 2000 probably. But it doesn't mean that is an excuse for anything because you don't scale if you can't control it. That's the bare minimum of ethics.

Is your thesis that Google is not:

1) Capable
2) Interested
3) Obliged
4) Something else

...to remove pirated content from the top of the search results page?

Craig Eliason

leksendesign said:

Putting this out here in case anyone else wants to file a complaint:
https://www.name.com/support#abuse

Got this reply:

Thank you very much for your notification. After researching the domain, we have found that Name.com only provides domain name registration for this customer. We are not the WebHost, internet service provider, or administrator for this domain. Name.com is not the domain's owner, formally referred to as the Registrant.
 
Given that we are not the WebHost for the domain, the allegedly infringing material identified in your notification does not reside on Name.com's servers. Accordingly, we do not have the technical ability to remove or disable specific items of objectionable content.
 
Again, because of the limited technical sphere in which Name.com operates, we do not believe that we are the proper party to contact about this.
 
In this case, we suggest you contact the party operating the website or the party hosting the website to resolve this matter.

jeremy tribby

Igor Petrovic said:

Jeremy, Google is not the dark web

I'm not sure I take your point here.. accessing or hosting onion-routed websites on the darknet is no more illegal or unethical than accessing or hosting websites on the clearnet. it's the content that matters

Igor Petrovic said:

I would like to hear a real-life confirmation for this

google publishes what it takes down here. broadly, large US platforms, like google, are inclined to respond to DMCA takedown requests, out of legal risk-aversion. anecdotally, kids do things like kick each other off of youtube with completely false DMCA complaints for sport, rather easily

I believe DMCA safe harbor policies and section 230 of the communications decency act (see viacom vs. youtube) are the legal basis through which "neutral" service providers like CDNs or search engines do not take on the legal liability of content other people are hosting. you are of course correct that legal frameworks are not ethical framework,  this is something we agree on. and you're right to question what content is shown when someone uses any search engine. I can guess we would have to agree to disagree on how we would moderate the internet, but your fundamental question — can search engines behave more ethically — is a good one. I think you are talking about something much broader than google or search, though, and it gets into not only ethics but geopolitics very quickly

in any case, I think the form is worth trying, if someone's goal is to remove something from google. as an aside, fonnts.com looks like it's hosted on cloudflare and cloudflare has a much stronger position on being "content neutral" than google, so there's not much to do from that angle

Igor Petrovic

jeremy tribby said:

it's the content that matters

This is exactly what I wanted to point out.

Thanks for these insightful links. From my perspective, they are very useful for understanding how Google washes its hands of piracy while actively pushing it on the top of search results.

Google filters content based on certain criteria. Obviously, piracy does not breach that criteria.

I think you are talking about something much broader than google or search, though, and it gets into not only ethics but geopolitics very quickly

It would be interesting for me if you could shape that roadmap from ethics to geopolitics. I speak about ethics from the structuralist point of view, as something inherently human, below the cultural or geopolitical surface.

Ray Larabie

Google is the biggest current threat to the type industry. I doubt that's willful; it's simply a machine that gathers customer data. They're incentivized not to do anything to help. If the font industry were somehow destroyed, they could pay even less for Google font development, increasing their font library and further expanding their data gathering reach. They could set up a Gemini agent or something to flag all the pirate sites and lower their search ranking. But why would they? It doesn't help their bottom line and doesn't significantly harm their image. They won't do anything because they don't have to.

jeremy tribby

Igor Petrovic said:

This is exactly what I wanted to point out.

Thanks for these insightful links. From my perspective, they are very useful for understanding how Google washes its hands of piracy while actively pushing it on the top of search results.

Google filters content based on certain criteria. Obviously, piracy does not breach that criteria.

I think you are talking about something much broader than google or search, though, and it gets into not only ethics but geopolitics very quickly

It would be interesting for me if you could shape that roadmap from ethics to geopolitics. I speak about ethics from the structuralist point of view, as something inherently human, below the cultural or geopolitical surface.

I appreciate your perspective on this, Igor! if you are taking this view, your appeal to ethics above all on this topic falls flat for me because intellectual property is not at all inherent or obvious to the human condition and is more unethical (causes more harm) than piracy. only after we create legal fictions around concepts of finance, intellectual property, and so on, do we inherit their problems. but that wasn't what I meant  

what I meant is that one can find US-registered intellectual property much more easily on yandex than google, that the US government created and funds tor (the dark web), that when sites get de-platformed by cloudflare they end up on ddos-guard, and that I think the reasons for this are more politically complex than the will of any individual company, as you are implying

C.Fransen

Isn't there an organization that helps type designers deal with these 'distributors'?
I know of a German company that does this for photographers. (stock photos)

Igor Petrovic

jeremy tribby said:

 because intellectual property is not at all inherent or obvious to the human condition

Here I sense either the intersubjectivity or relativization problem But my next attempt to solve it would probably lead to a lengthy discussion that would become off-topic for the type design forum. 

As per links with geopolitics, thanks for the one more insightful reply. All of those would be pretty solid arguments if I stated that Google is the only piracy provider. But I stated it's the biggest one. If it is true that Google's market share is 45 times higher than that of Yandex, not to mention even smaller players.

C.Fransen said:

Isn't there an organization that helps type designers deal with these 'distributors'?

There are paid services like Font Radar that scan the web and find instances of wrong font use (missing or not the right type of license). But as far as I know, there are no anti-piracy organizations or services that fight type design piracy effectively.

You can try DMCA takedown (usually not very effective because piracy sites hide their information anyway) or informing the browser that the font is your intellectual property kindly asking not to show it in the results. We still have no reports of successful outcome of this, hence this thread

jeremy tribby

Igor Petrovic said:

Here I sense either the intersubjectivity or relativization problem But my next attempt to solve it would probably lead to a lengthy discussion that would become off-topic for the type design forum. 

indeed! I think this is more interesting than font piracy, but you are right, it's off topic

Igor Petrovic said:

As per links with geopolitics, thanks for the one more insightful reply. All of those would be pretty solid arguments if I stated that Google is the only piracy provider. But I stated it's the biggest one. If it is true that Google's market share is 45 times higher than that of Yandex, not to mention even smaller players.

I was unclear, when I say easier to find on yandex, I mean there are things that won't even show up on google; 45 multiplied by zero is zero. in any case, I take your point overall about google search's market share, and the many responsibilities that come with it. I do think DMCA is one of the responsibilities they take seriously. and I still think search engines are beside the point vs. those who host the content,  but I won't belabor it 

Nick Shinn

If you want to move your fonts higher in search results, get blogging.

Stuart Sandler

Gang, please refer to these threads from 2019 and 2021 respectively:
https://typedrawers.com/discussion/comment/52857
https://typedrawers.com/discussion/comment/51470

@Lars Schwarz if you're still participating foundries may finally be coming around to what I've been shouting from the rooftops for years (after the failure of typesnitch to ever get off the groud) - Please share any updates or thoughts you may have as a way to move this effort forward.