- From: Håkon Wium Lie <howcome@opera.com>
- Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2006 11:54:45 +0200
- To: Daniel Glazman <daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com>
- Cc: W3C Style List <www-style@w3.org>
Also sprach Daniel Glazman:
> > Håkon Lie pointed out in his XTech presentation that according to
> > research by an unnamed corporation, there are 500 free ($0) fonts on the
> > Web. You don't need a DRM scheme with free-as-in-beer fonts. If the
>
> Håkon only forgot to mention that in that set, the fonts people use the
> most are "free" copies of existing commercial fonts...
Some of them look similar, but that's not illegal.
> Only geeks like us have heard about those free fonts. Make them famous
> and widely distributed and the copyright owners will sue the copy
> makers. The question is not "will they sue?", the question is "when?".
Copyright is certainly an issue wrt. fonts. The name of a font can be
copyrighted, as can any executable code inside (e.g.) truetype files.
However, the outline of glyphs isn't protected. You can -- in all
relevant jurisdictions, I believe -- print out hi-res renditions, scan
the printouts and generate new font files.
-h&kon
Håkon Wium Lie CTO °þe®ª
howcome@opera.com http://people.opera.com/howcome
Received on Thursday, 24 August 2006 09:55:33 UTC