I came across a site this morning offering a 9Mb RAR file offering fonts for free download. It’s quite a list:
Agency Bold, Alternate Gothic No. Two, Arial Rounded Bold and Bell Gothic Black, Avenir (Book, Medium, Heavy), Avernus, Base 9 Regular SC, Catull (the Google font), Digital Sans Medium, FF Cocon Bold, FF DIN Medium, FF Dot Matrix Two Regular, FF Meta Bold and Book, Frankfurter Medium or Bryant Bold Alt, Frutiger Black, Frutiger Bold, Handel Gothic Bold, Helvetica (complete set), Hoefler Text, Interstate Black, Interstate Regular, ITC Bauhaus Medium, ITC Officina Bold, ITC Ronda, Klavika, Lisboa Sans, Myriad Pro (complete set), Neo Sans Medium, Pixel Fonts, Proxima Nova, Syntax Bold, Trade Gothic Bold, VAG Round (Round, Rounded BT, Rounded Lt-Normal, VAGRundschriftD)
From the language used on the site, I’m not sure that the person involved actually knows that fonts are licensed software products, that you have to pay for with actual money:
By the way i would like to share 9mb file contained with web 2.0 font type files archived in *.rar format in order to fulfill some of my loyal reader request.
Whether he does or not, ignorance is no defence, so I did my civic duty and shopped him to ITC, FontFont and Linotype. I’ll be interested to see what happens (if anything). The thing I notice on the three companies’ sites is that there is only a general contact email, but nothing specifically to report piracy of their products. Very strange. David suggested a good way to encourage reporting of piracy would be to give the first person to report an instance of theft a bounty of those fonts being used illegally.