Way back in January 2014, I wanted to download a front from a site, but hold on there! 60 bucks for a font? Let’s go through inspect element…and…behold! Tons of .woff files containing the font that I wanted. I downloaded the file, slapped it into a .woff to .ttf converter, and had a font that would normally cost $60.
So, I posted a YouTube video about it. In the 3 years it was up until Monotype decided to copyright strike it (more about that later), it had gotten somewhere around 15,000 views, and 200-250 likes.
As time went on, most font sites noticed my exploit, and decided to change their font previews so that it a server-side image is generated, and you can’t download the woff files. I believe that this method does work on some font sites as of 2020, but I’m not 100% sure.
In 2017, Monotype found my video on the free font exploit, and decided to strike down the video (even though it was all original content, and to my knowledge I wasn’t on a Monotype website). Unfortunately, for the counter-notification I would need to submit loads of personal information, so I let the copyright strike be.
A detailed technical explanation can be found here.
