RE: EOT & DMCA concerns

Sylvain, given the position you describe here,
will you have any problem at all advocating that
all the font vendors at the table, and Microsoft,
should heartily endorse a draft Recommendation 
that says UAs "MUST" implement EOTL but "SHOULD"
implement EOTC-sans-enforcement?  And calling upon
Monotype to liberate MTX patenting in support of
that?   To thus advocate would seem to be consistent
with what you are saying here.   Such endorsement
would help to make very clear that people generally
don't expect EOTC to serve as a "protection" format
in the future and that other browser implementers 
are not legally constrained should they choose to 
support it.

-t



On Tue, 2009-08-04 at 20:37 +0000, Sylvain Galineau wrote:
> > From: www-font-request@w3.org [mailto:www-font-request@w3.org] On
> > Behalf Of Håkon Wium Lie
> > Sent: Tuesday, August 04, 2009 12:58 PM
> 
> 
> > This is a real concern. By accepting EOTL (and not EOTC) browser
> > vendors accept to ship an inferior product.
> 
> Why is it inferior ? EOTC ships on a majority of browsers today and, except for
> certain regions (India, Korea) remains unused and shall likely remain so as long
> as it remains browser-specific. EOTC would quite likely be  considered inferior
> to EOTL if it were implemented by all browsers.
> 
> Unless you now believe interoperability makes a format inferior to its proprietary
> alternative ? That seems odd.
> 
> >Microsoft marketing would quickly claim that only they "fully support EOT".
> 
> Microsoft marketing has done so and can still claim today that only we support EOT. Given
> how brilliantly that's worked I'm sure you needn't lose sleep over it.
> 
> > Font vendors might give rebates to those who are willing to "protect" the
> > fonts with root strings, at which point supporting non-IE browsers suddenly starts
> > costing money. This is not a compelling scenario, and I don't think
> > consensus around EOTx is possible.
> 
> Are there reasons to believe authors would be interested ? Given that authors want a
> cross-browser solution badly enough that the one that already works in IE today is
> left largely unused despite its high market share, I very much doubt this is relevant since...
> the EOT rebate already exists today ! Commercial web fonts are only available in that format.
> 
> >This is not a compelling scenario, and I don't think consensus around EOTx is possible.
> 
> The scenario is very hypothetical and deeply flawed. There has in fact been quite a bit of
> progress on this proposal in the past few weeks.
>

Received on Tuesday, 4 August 2009 20:47:03 UTC