Here’s something that has been bugging me… I am currently creating an application for an international corporation (naturally I won’t name them) and they use a specific non standard font for promotional material. I’ve asked them to supply this so I can use it in my application and they’re taking forever to get back to me (I asked weeks ago and a deadline is pending). I’ve noticed on all of their websites they use this same font and incorporate it using the @font-face feature.
Now the sneaky part of me wondered could I take the font their using within the @font-face and install it on my machine so I could finish my work. However then the worried part of me remembered that I have used @font-face for other clients and naturally there are distribution issues with such fonts (they’re property of the client and not for public use). I really wouldn’t want people to be able to install or distribute these.
Is it possible for someone to take the font’s I’ve used for previous site when incorporating @font-face. If these are available to visitors of my sites can I prevent their download?
Perhaps this is something I should lose sleep over…
Your worry should be “are these font files accessible and downloadable over http?”
The answer is yes. A web developer can open your CSS file, look at the URL/Filename and download the files to reuse. And I don’t believe there’s much you could do about stopping the downloads for reuse.