Typophile

Free font accountability

Stephen Rapp

I'm not sure if this is the correct forum for this, but it seemed related.

I was asked about a font by our licensing department today by the name of CAC Pinafore. I looked all over our fon servers and found nothing. I looked it up on the web and several free font sites had it listed and by American Greetings (my employer). We don't give out our fonts. I enquired in-house a little further and found a list of licensed use only fonts with the CAC prefix. These are versions made especially for use with a particular client. Apparantly someone got copies of these fonts and just downloaded them to Free Sites.

None of the free sites seemed to offer links to the originators and the zip file only contained the font and no read me file. I don't really have time to keep chasing this down as its not really part of my job, but I am curious if any of these free sites keep records of who uploaded the fonts to begin with. Has anyone else pursued this type of thing before.

Jason Walley

Yikes! That is a truly scary situation—piracy at its worst.

I know absolutely nothing about how those free sites are managed, but am certainly curious to know how this situation is resolved.

Best of luck with crackin' down on the piracy.

Stephen Rapp

I probably won't be pursuing it any further myself as I have piles of lettering jobs to get done. At a large corporation like American Greetings, fonts often go waltzing out the door through freelance workers and other channels. Once they get out there, its hard to control what happens with them. I design type here as well, but we don't officially have a type department. Our records on type development are therefore pretty scattered at best.

Janic

If you got them and they are in demand, my advise - sell them. Make them available to all (at a price) especially as they are walking out of the door anyway. Your company might recover some of the cost of developing them if they really are that popular.

J

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