Comment by refulgentis a day ago
In general, AFAIK, the general assumption is every font is absurdly easy to steal, and that you'll do so before purchasing it.
So it's de facto "free unlimited trial, free for personal use, pay for business if you have a soul and shame"
> I wouldn't try my luck with any non-free fonts made by Russian designers.
Depends if your home country cares about Russian civil court or not.
I would suggest not pushing your luck with webfonts though, because in that case you are distributing the actual copyrighted "code" of the font, not just the minimally protected shapes that it outputs. There are services which crawl the web actively looking for pirated webfonts on behalf of foundries (and their lawyers).
I had this happen to a client and even though they had both the web and print licenses they were hit with a 50k suite because the font file was malformed somehow. I'm not sure how it shook out but I hope they didn't pay a god damn cent.
How robust is that identification? Does it just look for file hashes or identical character shapes? I imagine it is trivial to repackage a font file to break the hash fingerprint.
https://www.fontradar.com is one. They also claim to analyze apps somehow.
Depends on the country.
I researched it for Russia recently and apparently the law is much stricter about fonts here than in the US. Both the character shapes and the "code" are copyrightable so you ain't getting away with converting it into a different format either. Companies did get sued over this and did have to pay millions of rubles in fines and licensing fees for their past usage. Not sure about individuals but I wouldn't try my luck with any non-free fonts made by Russian designers.