08.Apr.2009 Fonts don’t grow on trees, so stop raiding my garden!

For the past 2 weeks I just keep coming across instances of illegal font usage of my fonts. One was Koufiya extracted from my Reading dissertation and available for download on a forum. The audacity is that they complained about a technical error in a unfinished, illegally obtained font. Wow! The second was a big corporation using my BigVesta Arabic without a license. Then today I discovered my Frutiger Arabic on a sharing site. At least they label it as “top rated”. Thank you, but no thanks.

If people like my work, then they should respect my intellectual property. I have spent a lot of time and energy on my fonts and I hope people would appreciate the sacrifices that I have had to make in order to finish these fonts.

Giving my fonts to your friends for “loan” is stealing from me.

Downloading my fonts illegally is the same as breaking into my house and robbing me.

Typefaces are complex designs and fonts are software that need to be developed. They don’t just miraculously appear in the fonts folder. Designers spend a lot of effort and thought into them.

People complain that there aren’t enough good Arabic typefaces out there, but then they are not willing to support the people who dedicate their time for this. This is a simple business equation of supply and demand. If people “share” fonts, then there is no legitimate demand to speak of. Therefore less supply is necessary. So please let us not get to that point. There’s a lot of interesting designers doing great work for Arabic typography. Care about this? Then please support us.