Wait until they find out that when people visit the finished website in their browser, it will download the font! Oh the piracy!
Just like in the real world, someone handing you the keys to their car doesn't mean you own it.
Just like in the real world, someone handing you the keys to their car doesn't mean you own it.
However the license does not explicitly limit the tools you can use to build the website, and the website is allowed by the license to have the font. The argument could be made by licensing the font for a website they have implicitly licensed it to be on github because it is a widely used tool for managing the source code of websites and if they (the font owners) wanted to restrict its usage they should have specified.
Your best bet is to just use open source fonts, of which there are numerous.
That's not very useful, so the license says "you may distribute this font file as part of a website; you must be using this font to style a webpage. Any other kind of distribution at all is still prohibited." There's no "common practice" exception- just because they open up a little window that allows you to distribute the font in a particular manner doesn't mean they've accidentally given you the right to distribute it according to "common practice."
Sharing MP3s on P2P sites is also a common practice, but obviously you don't have a license to do that when you buy a CD.
So the argument would go as follows:
the contract says "you may distribute this font file as part of a website; you must be using this font to style a webpage. Any other kind of distribution at all is still prohibited."
We have used this font to style a webpage, as is industry practice we have placed the font in our site code, which is stored on github, which is also the most widely used tool for distributing website code. The website code must be distributed in order for the purpose of the license to be fulfilled - obviously the font cannot be distributed as part of a website if the website itself is not distributed.
At that point the court will have to determine what distribution of a website means, if the font to be distributed as part of the website means that the website will need to be distributed, and if github is so commonly used that the license giver neglecting to mention it have given tacit approval to its usage.
Aside from all this if one wanted to contest the issue the court would have to determine if the font being in your github repository is you distributing it just because someone else can fork it. For another silly analogy, just because you put your beer on the table, walked outside, and a kid came in and drank the beer, doesn't mean you sold liquor to a minor.
Perhaps I'm wrong but it doesn't seem as open and shut as everyone wants to argue, unless there is specific prohibition of github in the license in which case there is no longer a case to be made.