To expand a bit on Michael Kazlow's comments.
There is (was?) a bug in Fontographer, which for many years was the
font creation program of choice, that defaulted the embedding
preferences to "no embedding". The result is that there are thousands
of otherwise free fonts out there that cannot be embedded into
documents. Personally, I see nothing ethically, morally, or legally
wrong in changing the embedding flag in such fonts.
Commercial fonts are another matter. Most professional foundries allow
their fonts to be embedded. Some have produced fonts that
inadvertently (because of the Fontographer bug or incompetence)
prevented embedding, and there's at least one paranoid current foundry
that intentionally sets its fonts to "no embedding". AFAIK, with PDF's
rapidly becoming the lingua franca of document exchange, that makes
their fonts completely useless.
More details on the four different embedding levels (none, readable,
editable, and installable) as well as means of changing them, can be
found with appropriate google searches. You'll find a free Microsoft
utility that can change embedding levels, but only to make it MORE
restrictive.
- Herb