RE: Thoughts on font linking and embedding

On Wednesday, February 16, 2011 10:58 PM David Singer wrote:
> 
> I guess the point to be made about piracy of fonts and the same origin
> restriction is this.
> 
> If I write a page that *embeds* a font on your site, I might be able to
> persuade myself that *I* didn't steal it, since I never even downloaded
> it. But if I have to download and re-host it, because that site has a
> same-origin restriction, I don't have this (admittedly small) fig leaf
> to hide behind.
> 

Yes, this is exactly right. 
And what makes the matter even more confusing - you may be one step further away from *embedding* a font from my site, you may want to *embed* my CSS file that, in turn, embeds the fonts I host. Same-origin restriction eliminates this possibility - you can reuse the CSS as you like but the fonts will not be loaded unless you made a conscious effort to download and re-host them on your site. Once it happened (and assuming that the fonts are in WOFF format with proper metadata in place), you put a label on your website that says "the fonts are stolen from xyz.com website". ;-)

Regards,
Vlad

Received on Thursday, 17 February 2011 15:04:12 UTC