Re: The unmentionable

Thomas Lord wrote:

> Sometimes, by "garden fence", people mean a font file
> format which is distinct from TT/OT format.  That's
> an example of "protection" which does not involve 
> a technological restriction on the font. 

> In the past, people sometimes meant things like
> "root string enforcement" when they said "garden fence".
> That would be a technological restriction and would
> likely run into problems.

This is a good distinction. When I talk about minimal level of 
protection apparently acceptable to browser makers because not balked at 
in the .webfont and ZOT proposals, I mean primarily the first of these, 
i.e. a format distinction that protects against casual unlicensed upload 
of desktop fonts as web fonts and casual unlicensed download of web 
fonts as desktop fonts.

Perhaps this needs to be stated still more clearly: when I talk about 
protection, I am not talking about protection *of* font data online, but 
protection *against* certain kinds of casual misuse.

Font makers have been pretty clear that their objection to naked font 
linking is based on concern over exposure of existing fonts to misuse. 
Given many years of experience of the myriad ways in which people behave 
as if font licenses simply don't exist -- some of this behaviour 
conscious and deliberate, much of it ignorant and casual --, I believe 
these concerns to be very well grounded. So far as I can tell, all 
current efforts by font makers to come up with better proposals are 
based around drawing a line between desktop and web fonts such that 
casual misuse becomes more difficult, and these efforts are coalescing 
around two complementary measures: a format distinction and additional 
font meta data.

JH

Received on Wednesday, 29 July 2009 19:20:50 UTC