Re: WebFonts ready for use

2008/5/2 Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>:
> On May 1, 2008, at 2:33 AM, Dave Crossland wrote:
>> 2008/5/1 David Woolley <forums@david-woolley.me.uk>:
>>> Patrick Garies wrote:
>>>>
>>>> This could be dealt with by adding a shareability flag and/or domain
>>>> white‐listing mechanism to CSS3 Web Fonts that could prevent a Web font
>>>> from
>>>> being shared indirectly.
>>>
>>> That's what EOT fonts already do, and it is that model that people are
>>> rejecting in this thread.  A
>>
>>> EOT basically is a domain whitelisting wrapper.
>>
>> I think it is dramatically more than that; because of the encryption,
>> EOT is an "effective technological measure" under any applicable law
>> fulfilling obligations under article 11 of the WIPO copyright treaty
>> adopted on 20 December 1996, or similar laws prohibiting or
>> restricting circumvention of such measures.
>
> Is a trivial encryption algorithm like XOR with 0x50 really an "effective
> technological measure"? It has the strength of rot13, and now is publicly
> specified in a W3C Member Submission. Is the C ^ operator now a
> "circumvention device"?

I am not a lawyer, but its not necessary for a DRM scheme to REALLY be
an "effective technological measure" to have chilling effects on
innovation.

The most famous example of this happened in 2003:

"SunnComm has threatened Princeton PhD student Alex Halderman with the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for exposing a key weakness in
the company's latest CD copy protection technology, MediaMax CD3.

The company said today it will take legal action against Halderman for
revealing how MediaMax CD3 can be bypassed by holding down a Windows
PC's Shift key when a protected disc is inserted."
 - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/10/09/sunncomm_to_sue_shift_key/

In all European countries except Finland it is illegal to distribute
free software that can play DVDs with the CSS DRM scheme, because a
Finnish court has ruled that as DeCSS has been so widely distributed,
the CSS DRM is no longer really an "effective technological measure" -
but it was before the way to break that DRM scheme was widely
available.

Perhaps now that the EOT DRM scheme has been published, it is not an
"effective technological measure."

But it is still DRM.

-- 
Regards,
Dave

Received on Friday, 2 May 2008 22:17:46 UTC