How to pirate a font

Deckweiss@lemmy.world to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 137 points –

I have bought a font with a really shitty license agreement and I have a couple of questions.

  1. How can I best share the font with the community? (I am afraid of metadata in the font files, which may be tied to my payment account etc. - I had to register and log in to download the ttf files)

  2. How can I remove the DSIG and other metadata from the ttf file while keeping it usable?

  3. Are they able to detect it if I use the font in a commercial product online by crawling my website and if yes, how could I prevent an automatic detection attempt?

To my (and possibly your) surprise, I didn't find any free downloads of the font online. Their license is tied to a personal account, you have to log into once a year to keep the license. As far as I understand they theoretically could use the DSIG to let the ttf files "expire", at least when used in software that verifies the signature. But I may be wrong, please let me know.

Thanks in advance and cheers-I mean ARR

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Fonttools includes a tool to convert TTF to XML and back again. Makes it easy to inspect and remove unwanted metadata

What's fun about that, is that fonts are copyrightable, but typefaces are not.

Whats the difference?

Basically style vs the instructions that make up the font. It’s lead to a lot of rip offs (see: Helvetica vs. Arial).