Re: CSS3 @font-face / EOT Fonts

Håkon Wium Lie wrote:
> Also sprach Bert Bos:
> 
>  > A meeting at this year's W3C Technical Plenary led to a proposal
>  > for new technology that might well be a step towards solving the
>  > current standoff. The meeting minutes and an initial description of
>  > the proposal, with the provisional name "rooted fonts," are here:
>  > 
>  >      http://www.w3.org/Fonts/Misc/minutes-2008-10
> 
> Thanks for typing up the discussion and proposal. I think we should
> try to reach a compromise on this issue. 
> 
> The proposal starts out with TTF/OT files and make two modifications:
> 
>  - the font is lightly obfuscated (by changing a few bits in a
>    strategic place) to stop webfonts from being easily installable on
>    local systems
> 
>  - to add a new table with root strings, i.e, a list of sites and
>    pages that are allowed to use the font
> 
> I've done some soul-searching on this and reached the conclusion that
> I can live with the first part, but not the second; I don't want web
> resources to have inherent page/site restrictions. It breaks with a
> fundamental principle of the web, that web resources should be

I don't think commercial content producers for the web consider things 
like images to be web resources.  They rather consider them to be part 
of a compound document, which is defined either by the page HTML, or by 
the whole site (leading to anti-deep linking rules, and technical 
measures to frustrate deep linking).

Conceptually, I consider src element to just be a special sort of link, 
but I think commercial authors consider the linking aspects, especially 
cross-site, an unwanted side effect of the compound document technology.

> reusable. Further, it may violate the "fair use" doctrine of copyright

UK fair dealing is more restrictive than US fair use, but I believe both 
consider that a demonstrable loss of revenue to the copyright owner 
tends to invalidate fair use.  (E.g., I think if a publisher published a 
large print edition, it would not be legitimate to enlarge pages, on a 
photocopier, for partially sighted users, but it might be fair use to 
use that users normal print book to prepare such copies for the same 
user, if there were no large print version.)


> law. If root strings are accepted for fonts, content providers would
> soon ask for root strings in images and video as well.
> 



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Received on Thursday, 6 November 2008 08:43:13 UTC