RE: css3-fonts: should not dictate usage policy with respect to origin

> Håkon Wium Lie
> 

> I can see that bandwidth leaching is an issue. However, I don't think we
> will see sites leeching off others at a big scale. Leeching is simply too
> fragile.

That's because the scenario is not sites leeching off each other; it is tens 
of thousands of users linking to the same resource outside its original context. 
This happens even more today courtesy of services such as Twitter. Once one user 
has extracted the link to an interesting picture and posted it along with a witty 
comment, it can be re-tweeted a million times at no cost to those re-posting it 
beyond clicking a 'Retweet' link, before they then copy/paste it on Facebook. I 
have followed at least two links in the past week that reached a page showing a 
'This account has been shut down' because the onslaught maxed out their bandwidth 
cap.

For fonts, it's not at all inconceivable to imagine scenarios whereby
the web font on your blog is linked by one teenager from his MySpace page (or
any equivalent user service), then copy/pasted by his friends, their friends etc.
until you realize half your bandwidth is spent serving that file to hundreds or
thousands of pages. Or you share your Wordpress template which includes a local
reference to the font you've licensed; because it's really cool it spreads and now 
900 blogs load the font you paid for from your account.

Leeching is a very real 'thousand cuts' problem. Given the number of sites who 
implement Referer checking to mitigate it, it isn't so 'fragile' an issue in the 
real world.

Received on Wednesday, 22 June 2011 15:56:49 UTC