Github became the web's largest font piracy site (2017)
If I use a commercial font as part of my website design, I am in fact publishing that font on my site and anyone can obtain a copy of it -- in fact, they automatically do merely by visiting my site! Does this mean all my visitors are &quot;pirating&quot;? Of course not. Github may make the font more accessible&#x2F;searchable, but that doesn&#x27;t change anything about the copyright status of the font.<p>Me publishing something on Github does not grant everyone free rights to it -- in fact, copyright law says no one has rights to it unless I <i>specifically</i> grant those rights. This is most commonly done with a LICENSE file. The copyright rules apply to everything in the repository, including my code, and any fonts, icons or stock images. The fact something is on Github (or the internet, in general) doesn&#x27;t make it public domain, you still have to abide by the license terms.<p>While I think the suggestion that &quot;on github&quot; = &quot;piracy&quot; is stupid, I could see a couple things that could apply:<p>(1) If the license for the font explicitly states it&#x27;s for &quot;use&quot; or &quot;distribution&quot; on a single domain. Unless the license is clear about it, it&#x27;d really be up to lawyers to argue over whether hosting the code in a public repository on Github can be considered &quot;use&quot; or &quot;distribution&quot; -- and ultimately that argument is about one non-authenticating public URL being okay while another non-authenticating public URL is not.<p>(2) If I&#x27;ve put a commercial font in my repository along with a typical LICENSE file containing MIT&#x2F;GPL&#x2F;BSD&#x2F;whatever without explicitly stating the fonts are not under that license, then I&#x27;m basically mis-representing the license for that font (which I should not be allowed to do).<p>Given that putting a font on Github is technically no different from publishing on my site in terms of someone being able to &#x27;pirate&#x27; it, personally I think a Github repository with a proper license (not doing (2)) is fine, because the LICENSE file effectively says it&#x27;s <i>not</i> okay to just copy that font.