Re: non-normative best practices & file caching

Hello,

On 2 October 2010 02:02, John Hudson <tiro@tiro.com> wrote:
> David Singer wrote:
>
>> I think perhaps that the shoulds should be musts
>
> I'd be very happy for that to be the case.
>
> The impression I get from Håkon's comments re. this text being non-normative
> is that he and perhaps others might have objections to 'must' in this
> context.

This discussion is veering into DRM.

This text is non-normative. As I understand that term, it doesn't
matter if the standard says 'should,' 'must,' or 'pretty please' in
non-normative sections, because they all carry the same weight: none.
Any directives in such sections are very informal suggestions,
carrying no weight, whatsoever.

However, having recently spoken to lawyers about unrelated copyright
license issues, it seems that lawyers can try to paint things like FAQ
documents to licenses as normative - since they express the intent of
the license authors. Therefore I would like to see 'should' as the
strongest language used, even in non-normative sections, and would
prefer to see 'may' rather than 'should.'

>> or the language needs to talk about not making the font available outside
>> its licensed use (if the client can tell it's freely distributable, then you
>> can expose/install it if you like, but I don't know how it would tell)
>
> I don't think that is reliably determinable using any existing font data*,

I know that is not reliably determinable, because it is *impossible*
for a machine to know what the user is permitted to do. This is the
core of the DRM conundrum: Even if the file says "You can't do
anything," users are allowed to do various things under fair-use
exceptions and the like.

> I can't think of a situation in
> which installing the unwrapped content of a WOFF file is a necessary action,
> so it is easiest simply to recommend that this should not be done.

I can: The WOFF is entirely libre software.

Given that many web fonts will say "I am installable if you like me,"
it is entirely legitimate for users to install and use user agents
that have features to conveniently install web fonts. Libre fonts are
commonly used as web fonts, and installing libre WOFF-wrapped fonts is
likely to be popular.

The best and only legitimate thing such user agents can do is to
present the license metadata in the fonts to users *prominently* in
their user interface and trust that users to not choose to do what
they are not permitted to do.

-- 
Cheers
Dave

(Please note, this email is my personal opinion and does not represent
the views of any of my consulting clients.)

Received on Saturday, 2 October 2010 21:03:45 UTC