@metaphasebrothel

FYI: I know my fonts are not Helvetica's, or Futura's. Thank you for pointing that out. The sole reason I put the basic fonts (with only a few glyphs) on dafont is that I believe people should be able to use fonts free for personal use. I DO sell my full fonts (with kerning and all the glyphs) through my own site, myfonts, fontspring, monotype and more of those companies and they DO sell well. As a matter of fact I am making quite a decent living selling them. Maybe they're not your cuppa tea, but you really don't need to tell me that my fonts are crap and that I make too many. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and even if I did create a mediocre font every day, I still make a comfortable living selling them. And that, my friend, is more than most people here can say.

Naming and shaming is not done.
Fully agree. When the agency does not come up with a acceptable proposal first you go skiing. The easy way.

Or get drunk and forget about it all.....

@matephasebrothel

Just read something interesting in your reply: you say that no one will ever fork out $500 for one of my fonts. Let me tell you, they do. And more. And the news is: I am not even bragging. You may think you know all about the aesthetics of typography and you may even have a sophisticated taste when it comes to design, but, as I just pointed out (and am pointing out again), I do good. Period.

The Kat wonders whether Bobby has ever been Account Director at a multinational advertising agency, handling multinational clients, and/or Advertising Director at an in it's field of play world leading multinational company.

... hmm, you think???

The Kat doesn't think - as it has been told - the Kat wonders ...

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
Edgar Allan Poe

@honoded: Props to you! If you regularly receive large donations, I'm happy to hear that.

Keep in mind that this thread is about the circumstances of intellectual property theft, and not only about your specific situation. When another designer on DaFont encounters this same problem, they be instructed to read this thread, so we wont have to write these long replies more than once.

To keep the discussion lively, it was necessary for someone to play Devil's Advocate, in which opinions that are not entirely supportive are also expressed.

There are also cases where some forum members have fabricated stories, for personal amusement. A portion of some of my posts was directed to those situations, and not to you specifically.

Certain statements I made should be read and understood by anyone marketing a font that's freely downloadable, but has a fee for commercial use:

1) Make sure the terms of commercial use are included in the font file.

2) Allowing the commercial use fee to be determined by the user is naive. It assumes that most people will give fair value for fair value.

3) Nobody should be designing amateur or semi professional fonts with profit as the primary motive. Good quality fonts can earn significant income for a designer. Good quality takes time. Some designers are capable of designing good quality fonts, and some aren't. Spending more time on each font, rather than trying to make as many fonts as possible, is a better strategy.

4) There is no correlation whatsoever between DaFont download statistics and potential licensing opportunities. If a font has 1,000,000 downloads, that doesn't mean 1,000,000 different people have downloaded it. Many people will have downloaded the font more than once. Sometimes the author does that, to have their font appear to be more popular than it actual is.

5) There is no direct correlation between the popularity of a font, in terms of download stats, and its potential to generate income. A lot of people just collect fonts as a hobby. They download from DaFont, because the fonts can be obtained for free. If there was any fee applied, however small the fee would be, they would not. Many downloaded fonts are never extracted from their .zip file, and of those that have been extracted, a smaller percentage are ever installed, or actually used in any graphic design, as a percentage of the total number of downloads. I have Gigabytes of unextracted font .zip files. Many other people do, too.

6) When a font is made hastily, it often has a usable range between 36 and 72 points. Any smaller, and the display will become muddy. Any larger, and the errors will be magnified. If a designer makes a font that is average in terms of design and technical execution, he/she is competing against all the other average fonts, and all of the free fonts, for a limited purchasing market. When a font is above average, or excellent, in terms of design and technical skill, the number of competing fonts is much smaller. You have a better chance of generating income by making better quality fonts than you do by making a large quantity of average fonts, and hoping that a few people will be overly generous.

hanoded, I do apologize for disparaging remarks about the quality of some of your designs. Those remarks were not directed specifically at you, but to all of the designers who could make their fonts better, before submitting them. You have several very good fonts. You have many that are average. Some are below average. I didn't see one that I could call great.

You could make one or more great fonts. You have no reason to make any more average or below average fonts. Leave that market to the designers who aren't capable of making a great font yet, or ever. Make your work more valuable than $10, for commercial use. That way, everyone will benefit.

*********************

I never say anything negative about a 100% free font, regardless of the quality. It's only when a commercial use fee is applied that I register an opinion. All of my own font releases have been 100% free, in part because I use the fair use provision of copyright law frequently, and because I don't see much commercial potential from my dingbat fonts. I believe that all of my fonts are more valuable that the disk space they would occupy on a hard drive. I would download most or all of them, if they had been made by someone else. I would not pay any money to download any of them, nor would I pay money to use them commercially. They're just my gift back to the design community, for free fonts that other people have made, and I have enjoyed.

Each designer who submits a font that has a commercial use fee should ask themselves that one question: "Would I pay money to use this font, if it had been made my someone else; ie: is it better than a similar font, that is free for all use?". If your answer to yourself is yes, then your business model is sound. If the answer to yourself is no, then you should improve the font, to the point where your answer will be yes,or not make the font in the first place, or make it free for all use. All fonts should be worthy of charging a fee for commercial use, before a fee is charged for such use.

Best regards,

~bobistheowl

FINAL: they are paying. We agreed on a sum halfway from what I asked and what they wanted to pay. Case closed, everyone is happy (more or less).
@metaphasebrothel - if you want you can start a new thread about typography, aesthetics and how it should be done and you can ruminate all you want. This thread was about the illegal use of a font and I opened it to ask advice.

hanoded, I downloaded some of your fonts, and I stand corrected. A few of your fonts, notably DK Jambo, DK Carte Blanche and Moonlight Shadow are very well designed.

DK Sleepy Time is not. It's a deviantart font, and not a good one. You should not have been sufficiently satisfied with it to put your name on it. Your entire catalog suffers, when you drop a turd like that one.

I look at a few vectors in a font editor. I like the curves in D K Jambo. The DK Sleepy Time vectors appear to have had little of no editing done to them. The line widths are wildly inconsistent. It sullies the reputation you've built with your other fonts.

Bobby, will you ever learn to know what you are talking about? Please do.