Re: Fonts WG Charter feedback

On Thu, 2009-07-02 at 15:48 -0500, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>  Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 3:41 PM, Thomas Lord<lord@emf.net> wrote:
> > A "problem" in the minds of some may be
> > that if TTF and OTF are required then new
> > commercial and non-commercial markets would
> > likely follow for web fonts that work with
> > all popular applications, yet which are not
> > restrictively licensed.

> > In other words, demand would rise for fonts
> > with fewer restrictions and supply would
> > follow, diminishing the pricing power of
> > vendors of restricted-license fonts.

> That will happen or not regardless of the webfont format chosen.

Not quite.

If, tomorrow, IE suddenly supported TTF/OTF the market
I described would exist and have a lot of potency since
there would be room for trade in font files that work
in all major browsers and with all major desktops, 
printers, etc.

In contrast, if tomorrow EOT became the standard,
the appeal - the attraction of that market - would be
significantly less and for a long time to come.

There is a lot of talk to the effect that concerns
TTF/OTF support will lead to "accidental piracy" 
are the main motivation for resistance to TTF/OTF.
I am beginning to believe that that is not really
the motivation but, rather, exclusion by incumbents
against potential competitors is the driver.




>   *No*
> proposal floated in this group pays the slightest bit of attention to
> distribution rights on the author's side.  They generally differ only
> on the degree of effort a website *viewer* has to expend to download a
> font they see on a website and use it on their computer.


I'm sure I don't follow what you are trying
to say there but it sounds interesting.  Will
you please unpack that a bit (i.e., elaborate)?


Regards,
-t


> 
> ~TJ
>

Received on Thursday, 2 July 2009 22:18:14 UTC