

Re: New work on fonts at W3C

From: Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3c@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:23:50 -0400
Message-ID: <7c2a12e20906231023hb565794pfb7755605d4c3950@mail.gmail.com>
To: Brad Kemper <brad.kemper@gmail.com>
Cc: Jonathan Kew <jonathan@jfkew.plus.com>, "Levantovsky, Vladimir" <Vladimir.Levantovsky@monotypeimaging.com>, www-style@w3.org
On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 2:12 AM, Brad Kemper<brad.kemper@gmail.com> wrote:
> How could anyone copy a font who name is "This font licensed for use by XYZ
> Corp only" and not know that they were violating license terms (assuming
> they didn't represent XYZ Corp)?

I guess they couldn't, if that was the actual filename.  Unless they
use a script -- but that script could just as easily strip root
strings without their knowledge, too.

> Furthermore, the single font could be split into two fonts: one with the
> vowels, odd numbers, and punctuation, and the other with the consonants and
> even numbers, and then brought together via @font-face unicode ranges and a
> font-family stack. This would make it pretty hard to accidentally copy it to
> another site and have it work, without first understanding that they are not
> supposed to. And it would make it pretty difficult to use in other
> applications that do not have @font-face rules.

That's fiendishly clever.  Assuming it works seamlessly in all
browsers, it a) completely breaks all offline use without some
automated tool to reassemble the fonts, and b) forces anyone who wants
to use the font to track down and copy the actual @font-face
declaration, which could have a giant comment stating license terms.

The only font vendor objection I can recall that these don't address
is that they allow people to just upload fonts from their system to
their website, ignorant of licensing.  Any browser that even *permits*
OTF/TTF will have this problem.  You really would have to make a
different format (change a few bits, say) to address that.  But that
has the advantage of requiring only trivial changes to the existing
format to (hopefully) get something agreeable to everyone.
Received on Tuesday, 23 June 2009 17:24:27 GMT
