Re: CSS3 @font-face / EOT Fonts - new compromise proposal

Dave Singer wrote:

> You are under the powerful illusion that everyone is like you, willing 
> to search the net to find applications that might or might not run on 
> their machine, might or might not be legal, might or might not do what 
> they want, and so on.  I assure you that not everyone is like you.  You 
> may find this distressing, or reassuring, I can't tell.

For the home user piracy case, I think what is more likely to happen is 
that knowledge of the tools is pushed by word of mouth, or as the result 
of a forum enquiry answer, in neither case with any caveats about the 
tool being there to do something illegal.  It will be presented as a 
tool for providing a convenience, rather than as a tool for piracy.

It is only really when you get to medium to large businesses that you 
can rely on people being concerned about avoiding piracy, even then 
probably only at management level.  I know of a case where a staff 
leisure room was provided and people brought in lots of computer console 
games.  It had to be pointed out that the small print on the games made 
this illegal.

I quite often get offers of pirate copies of material, or illicit 
photocopies of parts of books, from friends and acquaintenaces, who see 
this is just being friendly. (Although off topic here, I think 
legislators actually need to think about whether the commercialisation 
of social interactions is actual a good thing for social cohesion, or 
whether they should be trying to find some way to make small scale 
sharing legal, whilst still protecting against large scale sharing. I 
can't see de-commecialisation of pop culture happening, and allowing a 
Creative Commons type environment to make such sharing legal by public 
licence.)
-- 
David Woolley
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Received on Friday, 14 November 2008 08:13:00 UTC