Re: EOT & DMCA concerns

On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 12:28 -0700, Thomas Phinney wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 12:06 PM, Thomas Lord<lord@emf.net> wrote:
> 
> > The proponents argue for EOTL with same-origin+CORS.
> > The rationales:
> >
> > 1) A required conversion step by authors
> > acts as a low garden wall.
> 
> I have never heard this argument until now, and I do not believe that
> font vendors are concerned about that particular direction of usage.


It's come up quite a bit.   The two
"conversion step" rationales are the 
entire basis for some parties saying 
"no TTF/OTF -- no `raw' fonts".




> > None of those stands up to scrutiny.
> ...
> > UA and desktop
> > implementers will surely automate the conversion
> > step for downloaders.
> 
> Beyond the UA's own needs for making the fonts work, which may indeed
> involve conversion and placement in the browser cache, what evidence
> do you have for this statement? 

Common sense.   For many fonts today and more
in the future, there are no legal problems moving
them between desktop and web.   In other domains,
for example archive files, or compressed files there
is a great displayed willingness to automate unpacking
(a fact I find slightly annoying in practice but
apparently I'm in the minority).  

Consider this case: a blog hosting company that 
allows people to customize their site with uploaded
fonts.  In the same way that Flickr and Youtube
handle a wide variety of input formats, decode them
and re-encode - we can reasonably predict that 
a wide range of font formats will be accepted,
decoded, and re-encoded.   Surely that will in fact
lead to some unauthorized font use but such a 
hosting service enjoys safe harbor protections and
can sit back and wait for take down notices or 
for the font vendors to give them tools to automate
recognition of "registered as restricted" fonts.

Consider what happens when someone writes "mod_font"
for Apache.



> What UA maker or desktop OS vendor has
> said they want to or are even willing to "automate the conversion
> step" back to desktop fonts for users downloading web fonts?

I'll write some code for the web-to-desktop case,
if it comes to that.   Perhaps I'll write mod_font
as well.You kiss your mama with that mouth?




> On a not-unrelated note, I think I need to figure out how to get Gmail
> to do a killfile....

Everything tastes better with a little ad hominem,
I guess.  

-t




> T
> 

Received on Wednesday, 5 August 2009 19:48:48 UTC