Many developers have inadvertently worked on piracy


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Envato Elements

The software development platform Github is uploaded with source code of various programs created by developers around the world. Font engineer Loel Nicenkens points out that many developers have included commercial fonts in their repositories and have been involved in piracy.

How Github becomes the web's largest font privacy site (and how to fix it) – Pixelambacht
https://pixelambacht.nl/2017/github-font-piracy/

Like regular software, some fonts can be used free of charge or modified and distributed, while others can be paid for. The font is set up with a license under various conditions of use, and if you want to use the paid font on the web, you need to purchase the license including that effect. In many cases, redistribution of paid fonts is prohibited by the license, and some licenses may be charged according to the number of users accessing the site.

However, if you search the most popular paid font 'Helvetica' on Github, you can find that it hits over 100,000.



In addition, when Nieskens checks about the 29,951 fonts sold by the paid font giant

MyFonts , a quarter of 7617 fonts are illegally uploaded on GitHub and caught in the search It has been said that According to Neiskens's research as of September 2017, the top 10 paid fonts caught in the search for Github are as follows:

1. Helvetica (100,194 cases)
2. Proxima Nova (67,810)
3. Myriad Pro (38,793)
4. Avenir (32,327 cases)
5. Museo (31,825)
6. Lucida (27,225)
7. Futura (28,872 cases)
8. Fraktur (18,908 cases)
9. Nexa (7071 cases)
10. Courier (6644 cases)


By

Envato Elements

These problems are caused by the fact that when a developer launches a new website, he creates a repository that includes paid fonts with images and JavaScript and uploads it to Github. It looks nice to be notified of a license violation, because the developer is not aware of the license violation, but the nature of Git causes additional problems here.

For example, Git preserves all of the repository's past state, so even if you delete a font that has violated the license, you can still read that font by performing certain operations. Github has published a method to delete files completely from the past data of the repository, and it is possible to delete paid fonts from its own repository if this method is used, but others do operations such as fork or clone to copy the whole repository. Once done, the only way to get rid of paid fonts from the copied repository is to ask the actor, and it's difficult to get rid of paid fonts completely.


By Envato Elements

Nicenkens recommends that when using paid fonts, either keep the repository private or configure Git to not include directories containing fonts in the repository.

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