Well, they did remove one of my pirated fonts after I sent them a cease and desist letter a year or two ago. I just checked, and it still isn’t there.
At least they’re responsible enough to respond to requests to remove pirated software, but I definitely do not trust the fonts there to be legal.
Okay, thanks.
I don’t even know if I trust myself anymore after all that LOL
It’s really simple for me. Free Font sites are like Free Picture sites. You really have no idea what you are getting or from who.
If you don’t see that it’s been uploaded by the original creator and there isn’t a full disclosure/agreement on what you can do and not do … Don’t take any chances.
If you are just “playing around” and practicing, that’s different. No harm, no foul.
Hehe, sometimes when you open a can of worms, they crawl up your nose.
Forgive my ignorance here. Crawling out of the grave, I don’t understand why the graphic design industry stopped talking about the differences between typefaces and fonts. Was there some intellectual property court ruling that I missed that said typefaces and fonts are the same thing?
rant/ It really jerks my chain when people muddy the difference between typefaces and fonts. Typefaces are visual. Fonts are technical. /rant
The way I’ve always understood it, typefaces are under older laws about using copyrighted images, where as fonts are under newer laws about digital piracy. As long as the OP is not sharing the font files, it’s perfectly legal, right?
I thought typefaces were a font family all this time 
Most font families are typefaces, but not all typefaces are digital fonts.
Not all fonts are typefaces either. I use digital fonts to make images.
Probably, yeah. Strictly speaking, though, the copyright holder owns the fonts and the user only has a license to use them based on the terms spelled out in the EULA.
With digital type, what was once a clear distinction between typefaces and fonts has gotten muddied. The term typeface refers to the design of the, um, typeface. Font refers to the collection of all the glyphs in the typeface into a useable file (at least in digital type). Others might argue definitions, but that’s the way I look at it.
For example, a type designer designs typefaces and also compiles them into fonts that are sold by font distributors. If you load a font into your computer, you now have access to the typeface contained in the font.
In the United States. typefaces have no copyright protection (although they can be patented in some instances). In many other countries, they do have copyright protection. Fonts, on the other hand, in the United States, do enjoy copyright protection since the software code making up the digital font is copyrighted.
I used to scan typefaces from my type books and turn them into fonts using Fontographer.
Thanks for clearing that up. I knew you would.
More information for anyone interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_typefaces
What is copyrighted in a digital font/typeface is the software code used to create the letterforms. That is the part you cannot give away. You can’t copyright the alphabet.
If you take your word, JET and outline it, you are not giving away the code. But you really do have to read the EULA before doing that. I’ve never heard of a font with a royalty clause, and would never use one if it did, but be aware.
There are also a lot of free fonts out there that require payment for any commercial use, but are free to use for personal projects. Watch out for those as well.
It also seems really dumb that you can’t supply your printer with a font file as one of the usual 5 seat licenses you get, in order to output your creations but that’s also “illegal.” Yeah, sure there is PDF, but there are limitations to how large you can create a pdf for output (Adobe’s limit is 200" x 200") In wide format, we tell you to outline your fonts because there usually isn’t a lot of type on something big, but with type intensive large stuff, you may want to coordinate with getting your printer on the same wavelength in order to save time. See if they are already licensed, or have them add the typefaces to the print bill. Does this happen? Most often not.
I’d highly suggest that if you have a lot of purchased fonts, that you keep a backup copy of them. The Adobe Typekit has been taking up options on a lot of the more popular fonts. You will find you are not able to package fonts the way you used to, and you better hope they don’t drop something you used in a past project. Something to keep in mind.