Most graphic design­ers don’t delib­er­ately steal fonts. But there are a num­ber of ways that a graphic designer can run afoul of eth­ics and the law when it comes to fonts – without even being aware of these pit­falls. One of the most pre­val­ent is pur­chas­ing fonts from a site that sells them illegally.

Font Pir­acy

Unfor­tu­nately, there are prob­ably more illegal or “pir­ate” font dis­tri­bu­tion Web sites than there are legit­im­ate sites. These pir­ate sites often tout them­selves as legit­im­ate file-sharing sites and may even seem to shun the post­ing of copy­right mater­i­als. But the truth is that they are run by people with no regard for the intel­lec­tual prop­erty rights of oth­ers. They get bundles of fonts – and some­times even the com­plete offer­ing – from a legit­im­ate foundry and then sell illegal cop­ies at a frac­tion of their true cost. Erad­ic­at­ing these pir­ate sites is like try­ing to con­trol a vir­u­lent fungus: even when they are shut down, they crop up again else­where, often under a new name.

Although the fonts might seem fine, if you pur­chase them from a pir­ate, you are receiv­ing stolen goods. Most of us wouldn’t con­sider buy­ing a tele­vi­sion off the back of a semi trailer. Buy­ing from a font pir­ate would be doing essen­tially the same thing.

The trouble is, although it is easy to know if you’re being asked to pur­chase a stolen TV, the same does not hold true for pir­ated fonts. The Web site might look legit­im­ate, and the fonts might seem to be the real thing. But ask your­self, does the price look too good to be true? If so, it prob­ably is.

A Com­prom­ised Position

Con­sider the fol­low­ing scen­ario. It’s mid­night and your dead­line is loom­ing. Sud­denly you real­ize you don’t have the font you need to com­plete the job. Know­ing the freel­an­cer next to you does have it, you ask him to send it to you. You install the font, meet your dead­line, and head for home. The next day your man­ager informs the team that the freel­an­cer is no longer on the pro­ject. Turns out that it was unclear whether all the software—including the fonts—on his com­puter was acquired leg­ally or not. Your “sat­is­fied” cli­ent is about to receive 20,000 cop­ies of a bro­chure you cre­ated using a bogus copy of their cor­por­ate font. Both your stu­dio and the cli­ent are leg­ally exposed.

Using fonts of dubi­ous ori­gin can com­prom­ise not only your repu­ta­tion but also the integ­rity of your com­puter and the vera­city of the doc­u­ments you cre­ate. Pir­ated fonts can bring vir­uses onto your com­puter, can affect the per­form­ance of your other, legit­im­ate, soft­ware, and can per­form unpre­dict­ably in doc­u­ments. You wouldn’t down­load a file from SPAM email; like­wise, you should steer clear of fonts whose lin­eage you can’t vouch for.