Re: CSS3 @font-face / EOT Fonts

On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 10:22 AM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com>wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 10:15 AM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 7 Nov 2008, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>> > On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 9:36 AM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
>> > >
>> > > On Wed, 5 Nov 2008, Thomas Phinney wrote:
>> > > > I believe this isn't DRM, but DRE (and even more so in the new
>> > > > "compromise proposal"). But of course calling it DRM makes it easier
>> for
>> > > > W3C folks to have a knee-jerk reaction against it.
>> > >
>> > > DRE is evil. Easily-circumvented DRE is pointless and evil.
>> >
>> > Wait a moment now, I don't think one can reasonably consider DRE evil.
>> > At least, not anymore evil than copyright itself.
>>
>> Your definition of DRE is obviously different to Thomas' definition. I was
>> referring to the idea of obfuscating font files, regardless of what
>> acronym you give it.
>
>
> Well, I'm just trying to avoid some double-speak.  I used the definition
> given by Creative Commons, which is the first link coming up in google for
> "dre digital rights" (I had to search for it because I'd never seen that
> particular acronym before).
>
> It does seem clear that obfuscating a font file is far more than merely
> expressing the user's distribution rights.  If an acronym like DRE is going
> to have any use at all it has to refer to actually expressing rights, rather
> than enforcing them.
>

Of course, now that I look at the *rest* of the results, it looks like
"Digital Rights Enforcement" is indeed a common definition.  In that case,
calling it DRE rather than DRM is simply obfuscatory wordplay.  At best,
it's defining "DRM" as something much closer to "expression", when it's
clear that in common parlance it means "enforcement".  Even in that best
case, the use it was put to in this thread is a distinction looking for a
difference.

(And as a random humorous aside, DRE = Digital Rectal Exam is currently the
fourth result on Google.  ^_^)

~TJ