Re: Web Fonts

On 17 Aug 2006, at 17:00, Jan Brasna wrote:
> What comes to my mind is licensing. I haven't found anything about  
> this in the specs - does that mean that the font file has to have  
> some kind of a free licensing scheme to be effectively put online  
> for usage like this?

It's perhaps the same as any other licensing issue of the web, such  
as licenses to reproduce images on a website. In practice, I'm not  
sure I see it as a CSS spec issue to fix that problem. That said, it  
was discussed at length a few months ago.

As I see it, there are many potential routes for font foundries to  
control the redistribution of their fonts: Centralising the location  
and only allowing downloads when the referrer header is on an  
approved list of licensed sites? DRM? Trust and honesty? I think so  
long as the CSS implementation doesn't do anything to impede such  
hypothetical authentication/control mechanisms that commercial  
foundries could implement at any point, it doesn't need to do  
anything more.

Ben