If I use a commercial font as part of my website design, I am in fact publishing that font on my site and anyone can obtain a copy of it -- in fact, they automatically do merely by visiting my site! Does this mean all my visitors are "pirating"? Of course not. Github may make the font more accessible/searchable, but that doesn't change anything about the copyright status of the font.
Me publishing something on Github does not grant everyone free rights to it -- in fact, copyright law says no one has rights to it unless I specifically grant those rights. This is most commonly done with a LICENSE file. The copyright rules apply to everything in the repository, including my code, and any fonts, icons or stock images. The fact something is on Github (or the internet, in general) doesn't make it public domain, you still have to abide by the license terms.
While I think the suggestion that "on github" = "piracy" is stupid, I could see a couple things that could apply:
(1) If the license for the font explicitly states it's for "use" or "distribution" on a single domain. Unless the license is clear about it, it'd really be up to lawyers to argue over whether hosting the code in a public repository on Github can be considered "use" or "distribution" -- and ultimately that argument is about one non-authenticating public URL being okay while another non-authenticating public URL is not.
(2) If I've put a commercial font in my repository along with a typical LICENSE file containing MIT/GPL/BSD/whatever without explicitly stating the fonts are not under that license, then I'm basically mis-representing the license for that font (which I should not be allowed to do).
Given that putting a font on Github is technically no different from publishing on my site in terms of someone being able to 'pirate' it, personally I think a Github repository with a proper license (not doing (2)) is fine, because the LICENSE file effectively says it's not okay to just copy that font.
Font licenses are pretty clear about what you are and are not allowed to do with the font files you downloaded. For instance, you're not allowed to zip them up and post them on filesharing sites. It does not matter at all whether you include a LICENSE file saying "this is a nonfree font."
The problem is not that you're misrepresenting the font as copyleft when it isn't. The problem is that you simply don't have a license to redistribute the font at will: merely uploading the font to a public GitHub repo violates the license.
You have the right to serve the font from your webserver, and link it into your site via CSS. You absolutely have not been granted the right to redistribute the font in any other manner.
If you post a page on your site with "Like this webfont? Download here!" and link to the same URL that you are using to host the font for display purposes, you'd be violating the license. It's the same exact URL, but you can't post a clickable download link to it. It's not allowed, and if you do, they can at a minimum yank your license to use it at all.
Editing to add: trying to solve the problem by adjusting your LICENSE file is roughly equivalent to the "I don't own this!!" disclaimers that people put on YouTube uploads. They get DMCA'd just the same.
The intent often matters, but there's clearly a huge difference between your example of a "download here!" link and usage on either a website or within a GH-hosted repo.
When you say 'the right to serve the font from your webserver' -- in this case, 'your webserver' may simply be GitHub's web-server, a service they provide to you as part of your payment to them (either because it's part of the app you host on GH, or as a piece of the website hosted via GH Pages [0])...
Assuming that the font's usage for the repo'd app/site is OK per the license terms, then I'd be surprised if its availability in the repo would solely cause it to fall out of compliance with the license. I suppose that the licensor could, if they chose to do so, specifically include terms to preclude the usage of the font on any sites hosted with "repository or other open file listing indexes", or any other similarly restrictive arbitrary terms.
The license I linked expressly forbids "distribution of the fonts through file sharing services and online version control repositories accessible by the public"
It would be the same if you publicly hosted a zip file containing your site's contents, including the fonts. Or offered an open read-only FTP account to your /web/ directory. Or any number of ways to make the font available publicly that isn't via a web browser making a request triggered by a CSS rule.
If it's a private repository, I expect you'd be in the clear, since it's just acting as a very fancy webhost, and you can obviously upload your fonts to your webhost.
In that case, it seems as though the rights-owner should simply take the standard route (even if suboptimal) to enforce their rights -- given the volume, they could likely work out a much better way to protect their IP (or automate it, in the worst case).
I'd be a little bit surprised if they cared a whole lot, given that finding the fonts is trivial for the reasons stated above. Almost comes across blog-spammy at that point, heh.
> If I use a commercial font as part of my website design, I am in fact publishing that font on my site and anyone can obtain a copy of it -- in fact, they automatically do merely by visiting my site!
It depends on the file format. Commercial web font providers typically don't offer TTF or OTF formats but only (subsetted) WOFF. You can't use WOFF fonts with most graphics design software (although conversion to TTF is probably trivial). That's basically the reason why WOFF was invented as it doesn't have much technical benefit over compressed TTF files.
The article on the other hand shows that lots of TTF and OTF files can be found on Github which is something the copyright holders certainly have a problem with.
The article is obviously mainly referring to font files under desktop font licenses that certainly don't usually allow publishing the files on Github or serving them as part of your site.
(While irrelevant: As for the technical difference or lack of between the two, from a license drafting perspective, it wouldn't really matter since you could easily write in the distinction to eg. the allowed purpose part of the license grant.)
> You set up your new web project, plunk your webfonts alongside other assets like images and JavaScript libraries, and commit your stuff to a public repo on Github. Not realising that this violates the license of the commercial fonts, you now made them available to anyone who can use Github’s search function. It happens — apparently.
> So, what to do when you want to use commercial fonts and be legit about it?
> Long story short, you can’t commit them to a public repository. There’s really no way around it: if you are not allowed to share the font with folks who don’t fall under its license, you can’t make it a part of your repo.
> Your options are to go for a private repo, or keep a note in your public repo telling the folks who’ll be using your project to license the fonts and add ‘em themselves. Stick your assets/fonts directory in a .gitignore so you’ll never accidentally commit them, and Bob’s your uncle.
It clearly isn't obvious. It seems explicit to me that the author is talking about all commercial fonts and that NONE of them should be in public github repos.
For an article that spends such a long time talking about how they searched for filenames, there is very little time spent exploring the actual copyright implications of using licensed fonts in opensource software or .
Me publishing something on Github does not grant everyone free rights to it -- in fact, copyright law says no one has rights to it unless I specifically grant those rights. This is most commonly done with a LICENSE file. The copyright rules apply to everything in the repository, including my code, and any fonts, icons or stock images. The fact something is on Github (or the internet, in general) doesn't make it public domain, you still have to abide by the license terms.
While I think the suggestion that "on github" = "piracy" is stupid, I could see a couple things that could apply:
(1) If the license for the font explicitly states it's for "use" or "distribution" on a single domain. Unless the license is clear about it, it'd really be up to lawyers to argue over whether hosting the code in a public repository on Github can be considered "use" or "distribution" -- and ultimately that argument is about one non-authenticating public URL being okay while another non-authenticating public URL is not.
(2) If I've put a commercial font in my repository along with a typical LICENSE file containing MIT/GPL/BSD/whatever without explicitly stating the fonts are not under that license, then I'm basically mis-representing the license for that font (which I should not be allowed to do).
Given that putting a font on Github is technically no different from publishing on my site in terms of someone being able to 'pirate' it, personally I think a Github repository with a proper license (not doing (2)) is fine, because the LICENSE file effectively says it's not okay to just copy that font.