Re: the alternative?

>I'm wondering what will happen if a working, secure embedding solution
>isn't made available soon.
...
>***This site looks best in StolenFont - click here to automatically
>download and install this font.***

Exactly. That is what will happen if font embedding is not available soon,
or if the protection scheme has a non-trivial cost in performance, quality,
or convenience.

Font authors and vendors may not be comfortable with weak protection, just
as software authors and vendors weren't very comfortable with distributing
programs on non-copy-protected media.  But the inconvenience of
copy-protected floppies (and dongles, and other schemes to prevent theft)
was too high a price for the protection.  Software piracy remains a
problem, but the abandonment of copy protection has made little difference
in that regard, and a number of software authors have managed to get rich
despite widespread piracy.

You can adopt an embedding scheme that users don't object to, or you can
try to force a more secure scheme on the world --- but the secure scheme
will just be ignored, and the download scenario will prevail.  I include
authors in the term "users"; a distinction made sense for publishing on
paper but is rapidly disappearing on the web. Users won't tolerate bitmap
fonts (you can make them fast enough, or good enough, but not both), they
won't tolerate schemes with indirection to a vendor font server (for both
performance and convenience reasons), they won't tolerate font substitution
(or so the experience with pdf suggests).

--Michal Young, Purdue

Received on Thursday, 22 August 1996 15:16:55 UTC