Google Fonts illegal in Germany!!!

Why do you still sell Wordpress-Themes like “Themeforest X The Theme” which use Google Fonts loading dynamically from google.com . This is ILLEGAL in Germany now and can cost a lot of money.
Unfortunately you don’t´give service to this product anymore. I will not buy anything here again.

Germany is not a “whole world” - if something is “not legal” in your country it does not mean it is the same for other countries.

Also, we (theme authors) don’t know the rules and laws from all countries all over the world (no one knows). You are buying a theme/template and it is up to you to check if some parts in some way are “illegal” in your country. Or if you can not do it alone - you should hire someone from your country (or someone who knows all laws and rules from your country to check that). Again, you are not buying a “finished” project / website - you are buying a theme/template.

Couple years ago, Envato/ThemeForest has forced us (theme authors) to link fonts only directly from the Google website – we where not allowed to downloads fonts and share them inside our theme because of license/rules of sharing some other work (maybe this has been changed in mean time - I have not checked).

Solution for you should be this plugin: OMGF | GDPR/DSVGO Compliant, Faster Google Fonts. Easy. – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org

That plugin will detect all Fonts which are loaded directly from Google Website and will remove links and also download those fonts and use them from your own host. If you decide to use that plugin, check again with someone from your country who knows the law/rules. I want to say – there are also other websites from which you can load fonts directly (not only Google). Probably you are not using fonts from other website but I want to let you know that is also possible.

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If I understand correctly, the court classified IP addresses as PII, which means this ruling may technically extend not only to Google Fonts but to all hosted font CDNs, so you’re probably going to want to exclusively use locally-hosted fonts.

This ruling was very unfortunate. Using CDNs for fonts is ideal. It reduces overall compute time, saves bandwidth for both websites and users, and is more carbon-friendly overall due to the single source of cache.

For those reasons, Google Fonts is the correct choice for the rest of the world. I would not expect authors to drop it. For affected website owners in Germany, using a plugin like the one mentioned above will suffice – just make sure to check the website after enabling it, to make sure it’s indeed catching all of the fonts.

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Hello @limax73!
Do you have a link to the German government document, or link to any solution that your government recommended to work around this?

Sounds like you are not aware that there are other countries apart from germany, who have logical laws when it comes to usage of CDN and Google fonts. If your country has a screwed up laws for common things, is it authors concern? You can customize as needed the fonts part if you really needed that theme.

No work-around. You gotta remove all of the Google fonts from the website and use local fonts. You can use though “Disable Google Fonts” plugin.

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Because Google’s online fonts violate the GDPR politics. It starts collecting data about the user before he makes any choice. But I don’t see any problem with including fonts locally. Especially after disabling caching on the Google side - local fonts are faster.
Here is Google’s official recommendation to use local fonts, it’s been 4 years now :wink:
So this is the natural evolution of the internet, no need to get angry about it. We, as developers, want to make it even better.