Re: the truth which dare not speak it's name

Hi,

Right. Which returns to Toms post that started this thread: will IE support
plain TTF fonts in exchange for others supporting a new foundry-friendly
format?

Regards, Dave

On 9 Jul 2009, 2:52 PM, "Mikko Rantalainen" <mikko.rantalainen@peda.net>
wrote:

Christopher Slye wrote: > On Jul 8, 2009, at 11:32 AM, Christopher Fynn
wrote: > >> While this is a...
Obviously, I'm not a lawyer, but why do fonts require this extra
protection when every other media and file formats do fine with just
copyright law?

I'm running Ubuntu Linux as my operating system and pretty much every
piece of software I'm running is free software and I know I have a
license to distribute verbatim and/or modified versions of pretty much
any file on my computer. I still wouldn't expect to win in court with a
defense "most of my files are properly licensed so I assumed that this
file was too" if I were infringing a copyright on *any* file.

Under modern copyright, you cannot copy a work unless
(1) you own the copyright, or
(2) you have a proper license.
As a result, you cannot assume to be able to copy any given file (font
or not). I'd expect that to hold in court.

In addition, I'd like to point out that if such wrapped format is the
only font format that works across all browsers, then majority of such
wrapped files will contain free fonts (because of cost). As a result,
the defendant in your imaginary court case could still claim "the font

was on the web site, and most such fonts are free, so I just assumed
this one was". If you have to always wrap the font for your domain, then
that action is required for all fonts (also free) and does not require
any special step for restricted fonts.

So, are you arguing that restricted fonts should be distributed under
some wrapped format and free fonts should be distributed as raw TTF/OTF
files? If we had such arrangement, then it would be clear to casual user
that when a font is not a TTF/OTF file, it must be special.

--
Mikko