Re: Fonts WG Charter feedback

On Sat, Jul 4, 2009 at 7:35 PM, John Hudson<tiro@tiro.com> wrote:
> Håkon wrote:
>
>> Personally, I think that license terms is a better enforcer than
>> technical means, but I'm also open for a technical solution:
>
> License terms need to be policeable, in ways that don't mean that we spend
> all our time chasing pirates instead of making new fonts. So I like the idea
> of single-origin linking as described here:

Well, no, they don't *need* to be, especially if such a thing would
require excessive effort on the part of authors.  I understand that
font vendors don't want to spend the (significant) effort to track
down copyright infringers, but that doesn't mean that others should be
forced to do the work instead.  Copyright infringement is ultimately
an economic 'problem' that can only be 'solved' with an economic
response.

Note, though, that single-origin linking doesn't stop copyright
infringement at all; you can still download the font without
permission and put in your own server.  It just makes hotlinking
ineffective.  This is a nice benefit for us authors, as fonts can
potentially be widely reused on a variety of sites (unlike image
hotlinking, which is relatively benign - many images that are used in
the construction of a site are of little use outside of that site),
and we'd like to be able to prevent hotlinking as easily as possible.
It's neutral for font vendors.

>>  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2008Nov/0412.html
>
> Compression should benefit everyone, so seems a no-brainer.
>
> I'm afraid I can't claim to have read all of the >200 emails of the last few
> days. I am wondering if you, or someone else, can summarise what *technical*
> objections Microsoft might have to a scheme such as you describe, other than
> that they already support EOT in their browser.

>From what I understand (Sylvain, Chris, etc. please correct me if
necessary) MS doesn't have any technical objections to a
compression/obfuscation proposal.  The only real wall we're running
into is convincing MS to *also* support linking to raw TTF/OTF files.
My personal preference at this point is to get everyone to support
both TTF/OTF and EOT-without-rootstrings, coupled with same-origin
restrictions.  Then we can possibly discuss a future compromise
proposal for use a decade or so from now.  I know at least a couple
other people on this list would find this sort of thing acceptable as
well.

~TJ

Received on Sunday, 5 July 2009 16:39:26 UTC