Re: CSS3 @font-face / EOT Fonts - new compromise proposal

(I didn't mean this subthread to fall off the mailing list; I'm
forwarding it back now.)

"Levantovsky, Vladimir" <Vladimir.Levantovsky@MonotypeImaging.com>
wrote:
> Zack Weinberg wrote: 
> > (Would you please use standard email notation for quotes?  In 
> > your past several messages it has been quite difficult to 
> > tell which words were yours and which were quoted.)
> 
> Sorry, Outlook doesn't let me use standard email notation for quotes
> when the incoming message is written in RTF or HTML format. In those
> cases it uses a colored text to differentiate quotes from different
> people.

Well, the coloring is completely lost when you send the message.
Could you please talk to your sysadmin about that?

>> Rob is being reasonable.  It's not possible for Mozilla to 
>> implement "TCPA-style down-to-the-metal DRM" ...
>
> No, this is not what I want! Nobody had asked for "TCPA-style
> down-to-the-metal DRM". Had it happened, I would have agreed with you
> that the demand to do it would have been unreasonable. EOT was the
> only proposal on the table and, so far, I've been as flexible as I
> can to work around the issues that people didn't like about EOT.

From Mozilla's point of view, the various obfuscated font proposals that
are being discussed are different from down-to-the-metal DRM only in
that there is no *technical* reason why we couldn't implement them.  We
still have to talk to our lawyers about all of them, because we don't
know if we can implement anything that has the effect of restricting
what an end user can do with a blob of data they got off the net
without exposing ourselves, people who reuse our code, or our end-users
to additional legal risk -- even if nobody is actually violating
anyone's copyright.

Now, speaking only for myself, I am not a fan of systems that make web
authors who are doing entirely legitimate things jump through extra
hoops.  EOT was definitely such, and I'm dubious about root strings.
I'm also dubious of proposals that involve the browser paying attention
to the embedding bits in unobfuscated TTF or OTF -- I think that could
easily break legitimate uses.

The compression-only plan you've been talking about might be okay, but
there would need to be tools for working with the compressed format
widely available under Free licenses, the MIME issues would need to be
sorted, and so on.

> I am sympathetic to your concerns and I do appreciate yours and Rob's
> efforts. As a new member of W3C, Monotype Imaging has made a
> submission that is governed by the W3C rules and policies (including
> W3C RF Patent policy), with no exceptions and no special provisions
> (see http://www.w3.org/Submission/2008/01/). I do not see any reason
> why our submission could possibly be treated any different than
> submissions from other W3C members made under the same policies,
> which, as Rob has admitted, you have implemented in the past. 

The problem is that your submission does not include an actual patent
license, only a promise to provide a patent license at some time in the
future, with terms unspecified.  That may be fine by the W3C, but we
need an actual patent license that makes no restriction on the use to
which the code is put, before we can include the feature in anything we
ship.  (This is completely independent of the legal concerns I
mentioned above.)

zw

Received on Wednesday, 12 November 2008 02:38:17 UTC