Hacker News Reader

Comment by Brendinooo | Hacker News Reader

Yikes. You ever try making a font? Do you know how many hours it takes and what kind of profit margins you're eating into?

View on HN

Find a better business model. I could care less about people not being able to extract enough money from their monopoly rights.

Most people that pirate stuff never would have bought it to begin with. If pirated stuff wasn’t available, they’d have just gone without or gone with a free alternative. I don’t expect it has much impact over all.

It entirely depends on how OP was using the fonts.

The profit margins we are eating into is exactly ZERO. Why? because if most of the time i need to actually pay for it, i'll just use the cheaper alternative: Google Fonts.

There will be times when I need to use this font and make something that will go live. That's the time to buy a font.

If font making is not profitable, then don't make fonts.

This attitude is absolutely bonkers.

Someone is making a product and telling you what you can and cannot do with it, and then you decide that none of that applies to you, because...I don't know, you're entitled to use it if you happen to see it?

"There will be times when I need to use this font and make something that will go live. That's the time to buy a font." - that depends on the license that the font foundry grants you.

"If font making is not profitable [due to lost sales via piracy], then don't make fonts"...some kind of mental gymnastics there. "I will take freely from you and if you can't afford to let me do that, it's your fault for making it in the first place" is a tough ground to stand on.

Most of the people who are taking your fonts are also making a product. We understand the need to make a living and the difficulty of making a product. I hope you get paid for what you do but you don't get to decide the market size for your product when it is a digital good. The market does.

There is a market for paid specialty fonts used on a website. People should pay for that. However, there is not much of a market for paid fonts used in Sketch when developers and designers are testing out different concepts they MIGHT use in production. You complaining that you are failing to monetizing off that non-existent market is completely bonkers for me.

The ground I stand on is reality. You're living in a fantasy land where musicians still get paid big dollars for records and where journalism is a lucrative career.

> You don't get to decide the market size for your product when it is a digital good. The market does.

"It's easy for me to acquire content against the content creator's wishes, therefore I should dictate the market."

> There is not much of a market for paid fonts used in Sketch when developers and designers are testing out different concepts they MIGHT use in production.

Never said there was. There's an easy solution: don't take a font that doesn't belong to you.

This all boils down to "I want something and don't want to pay what the creator thinks it's worth." It's disrespectful, and it's straight-up entitlement. Just don't use the font. Nobody owes you a particular typeface.

> The ground I stand on is reality.

The reality is that it's easy to do the wrong thing here, so you do it, then try to pretzel your way into thinking that it's not morally wrong. Think someone's overcharging? Then don't buy the product.

The reality is that most people like myself are continue to do this regardless of your morality rant. The problem is that your morality argument is based on licensing terms and the legal system. The internet has its own morality that is somewhat untethered to legality: use what you can get, pay for what you feel you should. You can claim that this violates copyright or morality but people vote with their clicks and git clones - there is nothing you can do to change that.

And you can scream and write these type of blog posts all you want but really it just ads to the Streisand effect. You think this blog post net increased or decreased the awareness and use of github as a source of fonts?

> The internet has its own morality that is somewhat untethered to legality: use what you can get, pay for what you feel you should.

I see you chose more of a passive tone here, as though you're just a cog in the machine, totally helpless and unable to take action on your own.

The Internet is what people make of it, in part based on the sum of individual choices.

> And you can scream

Not screaming.

> it just ads to the Streisand effect

Possibly. Maybe it alerts GitHub devs to the problem and they try to come up with a solve. If font creators read it, they can work with repo owners to get things in order. For my part, it pointed out a problem that I can take steps to mitigate in the future with my own repos.

Anyways, obviously I can't stop you or anyone else from taking digital goods at will. But in part, I wish that people would be more transparent about their motives instead of talking themselves into thinking that they're not actually doing something wrong.

Just say "I take things that don't belong to me because I deserve to have them, it's easy to do so, and I won't get in trouble". At least it'd be an honest assessment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com