Received DMCA takedown notices for a paid font I used for my wife’s interior design website that she liked but we didn’t pay for because…I’m lazy.
I was surprised to receive the DMCA (it is hosted on GitHub Pages). I ignored the emails because…I’m lazy.
They (GitHub) eventually took down the repository (and site). So I swapped to another font and I don’t think my wife noticed.
I think all of this was still easier than probably paying for the font!
Lesson of the story? Don’t underestimate the impact of laziness on your potential customers.
dijit 2 hours ago [-]
Whoa. How does this work?
One of the major issues we had at my previous company weaning people off of powerpoint (to google docs) was brand fonts. Ours, of course.
A lot of what is considered brand identity in presentations comes from fonts, which makes Google Docs Slides a non-starter for many unfortunately.
(we ended up making them in powerpoint and using the Google Docs compatibility mode with pptx).
mhitza 2 hours ago [-]
From the small info icon that opens up a section.
> Google Workspace lets brands who pay enough embed custom corporate fonts into their docs and slides. Normally, these are locked to just those brands shelling out for custom typefaces, but there's one loophole: the ol' copy/paste. Below are a selection of brand fonts with which you can do exactly that. Enjoy.
dijit 2 hours ago [-]
Oh thanks! I looked but I missed that.
So, I need to be super rich? Thats sad.
vrganj 52 minutes ago [-]
Why did we go from owning the software we run and being able to just modify things as we see fit to "You have to give Google a lot of money so you can have your own font in your own presentation"?
Where did things go this wrong?
wongarsu 1 minutes ago [-]
You can still pay Microsoft money to get a desktop copy of Powerpoint, which will use your system fonts. Using google docs is entirely self-inflicted
Granted, you now need to pay Microsoft a monthly fee for Powerpoint instead of a one-time-fee. But that is in large part because too many people preferred Google Docs, so Microsoft tried to become more like them
Someone 47 minutes ago [-]
If you want to drink your own wine in a restaurant, you have to pay for that, too.
This isn’t much different; there still are plenty of non-Google options for creating presentations to choose from that do allow using your own font.
Andrex 38 minutes ago [-]
I'm going to go the unpopular route and ask, how mission-critical are fonts, really? Protected fonts such as these can't be mission-critical, legally, right?
Never felt myself lacking for fonts in Docs, myself. Quite the opposite, Google Fonts has way more than I'd ever have preinstalled and is now my primary avenue for typeface discovery.
vrganj 27 minutes ago [-]
Depends on what you do.
Are you building a slide deck on your systems architecture? Probably doesn't matter.
Are you building a marketing deck on your new corporate identity? Probably matters a lot.
Either way, the tool I'm using shouldn't be the one deciding what matters and what doesn't. Just let me use my font as I please!
brk 8 minutes ago [-]
It doesn't matter on the corporate identity either.
rafram 2 hours ago [-]
> Google Workspace lets brands who pay enough embed custom corporate fonts into their docs and slides. Normally, these are locked to just those brands shelling out for custom typefaces, but there's one loophole: the ol' copy/paste.
varun_ch 39 minutes ago [-]
I knew about this for Google’s own fonts but had no idea they offered the option to use custom fonts. Is there any easy place to find a list of them? I wonder if the custom fonts are just hardcoded/pushed to their CDN alongside all the other ones.
ILoveHorses 29 minutes ago [-]
Any idea how did the creator manage to get access to the fonts in the first place? Won't you need a Google Docs document which uses the given font and then copy it from there and put it up on the website? Or is there some way the creator could have put these fonts on his website from publicly available information?
bogdan 13 minutes ago [-]
Have a look at the raw clipboard data with something like https://evercoder.github.io/clipboard-inspector/ and you'll see how it's all set up. A bunch of markup that can be obtained from any google doc with the font name updated.
yorwba 17 minutes ago [-]
It's just setting the font-family in the style attribute of a <span>. (As you can see by inspecting the text/html content of your clipboard, e.g. with `xclip -selection clipboard -o -t text/html`)
ngrilly 1 hours ago [-]
Would be really good if Google Docs could support custom brand fonts by letting their customers upload them in the admin console.
novov 1 hours ago [-]
Is there any difference between Source Serif and Source Sans as listed here and the publicly available versions, given they are open source typefaces?
WillAdams 29 minutes ago [-]
Surprised that such font access isn't gated by IP address --- usually font licenses are quite restrictive and have such requirements for usage.
jonpalmisc 17 minutes ago [-]
The licenses (from major foundries/vendors) are indeed usually quite restrictive; however, the hard part has always been enforcing them. It's not surprising to me that Google hasn't built any guardrails around this.
After all, gating by IP address? What happens if someone from the marketing team logs on from an airport? All of the slides revert to Arial?
love2read 1 hours ago [-]
I really like the style of copying the “google tool” style that this website and jmail use. It makes the project feel different compared to all the ai-generated app these days.
Rendered at 14:01:36 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I was surprised to receive the DMCA (it is hosted on GitHub Pages). I ignored the emails because…I’m lazy.
They (GitHub) eventually took down the repository (and site). So I swapped to another font and I don’t think my wife noticed.
I think all of this was still easier than probably paying for the font!
Lesson of the story? Don’t underestimate the impact of laziness on your potential customers.
One of the major issues we had at my previous company weaning people off of powerpoint (to google docs) was brand fonts. Ours, of course.
A lot of what is considered brand identity in presentations comes from fonts, which makes Google Docs Slides a non-starter for many unfortunately.
(we ended up making them in powerpoint and using the Google Docs compatibility mode with pptx).
So, I need to be super rich? Thats sad.
Where did things go this wrong?
Granted, you now need to pay Microsoft a monthly fee for Powerpoint instead of a one-time-fee. But that is in large part because too many people preferred Google Docs, so Microsoft tried to become more like them
This isn’t much different; there still are plenty of non-Google options for creating presentations to choose from that do allow using your own font.
Never felt myself lacking for fonts in Docs, myself. Quite the opposite, Google Fonts has way more than I'd ever have preinstalled and is now my primary avenue for typeface discovery.
Are you building a slide deck on your systems architecture? Probably doesn't matter.
Are you building a marketing deck on your new corporate identity? Probably matters a lot.
Either way, the tool I'm using shouldn't be the one deciding what matters and what doesn't. Just let me use my font as I please!
After all, gating by IP address? What happens if someone from the marketing team logs on from an airport? All of the slides revert to Arial?