For the last few years I’ve downloaded a ton of free fonts, mostly from DaFont for personal use, and for college projects. I never looked at the rights usages at the time.
After reading about how much issues might arise from using them, should I uninstall all of them?
There are some good type designers who, at times, release free fonts as a way to advertise their commercial fonts. Ray Larabie’s fonts for example, are always problem-free — as are his commercial fonts.
The problem is differentiating the well-built fonts from the junk since they’re never labeled as such.
An equally big problem is separating the pirated fonts from the legitimate ones. I spend a good deal of time each month or two sending out take-down emails to various free font distributors list pirated copies of commercial fonts I created. Sometimes they take down my fonts, but as often as not someone uploads them again a few days or weeks later. It’s a losing battle.
Sometimes, they’re even listed under my name. Other times, people have taken them, opened them, changed a thing or two, broken other things and resubmitted them as their own work. In other words, totally pirated by slime bags.
My best estimate is that most fonts on the free sites are total junk that’s been quickly thrown together or scanned and auto-traced. Most of the rest are pirated.
A good, quality type family of several fonts can take upwards of a year (or more to design and build). Hardly any professional will put that much time into a font only to give it away for free. In other words, unless you’re able to separate the legitimate, OK-quality free fonts from the iffy ones, I recommend steering clear of them. And yes, I regard DaFont as an iffy source.