Re: New work on fonts at W3C

On Jun 25, 2009, at 12:25 PM, "Levantovsky, Vladimir" <Vladimir.Levantovsky@MonotypeImaging.com 
 > wrote:

> On Thursday, June 25, 2009 2:19 PM Brad Kemper wrote:
>>
>>
>> Sure. I believe one of your objections to using raw formats was that
>> it would allow cross linking if other browsers did not enforce same-
>> origin restrictions on them. I know you had other objections too, but
>> on this point, given you link go other means of restricting cross-
>> origin linking (such as referrer), would that satisy that particular
>> objection to raw format distribution of fonts, if these other
>> (admittedly imperfect) means were employed?
>>
>> By "large amount of licence violation" (I meant to say "prevent" it,
>> not "provide" it), I mean that if a Web site employed a mechanism  
>> that
>> only let the font be served based on the referrer value being
>> acceptable (i.e. only coming from licensed sites or staging servers  
>> or
>> maybe even from Google Cache, etc.), that this would go a long way
>> toward preventing mindless linking to fonts from people at other  
>> sites
>> that did not understand the licence restrictions.
>
> Yes, I think this would be an acceptable solution, especially  
> because if
> you, as an author, licensed a font from a font foundry - both you and
> the foundry would be "in the same boat" on this. Font foundry wants
> their IP be protected from misuse (hot linking), while you, as a
> licensee, want to protect that IP to satisfy your license conditions.
>
> However, this has nothing to do with using a particular data format,  
> and
> can be used with any font, be it raw or EOT with empty root string.

Exactly.

> And,
> this mechanism would not address the other concerns relevant to raw  
> font
> use.

Which I noted.

> If I get a URL that looks like
> http://your_domain/fonts/coolfont.ttf - I can click on it and "Save  
> file
> as" dialog would pop up - the referrer value wouldn't prevent it. Raw
> fonts can be saved directly to my "Fonts" folder - this is why font
> foundries don't want to allow raw font use.

Yes, but I thought you said earlier, given that it would be nearly as  
easy to unwrap a font that was in a wrapper format, the main problem  
would be from people who didn't realize that viewing source and  
copying the URL would be stealing from you. So let's say that the  
author only served the font if the referrer appeared to be from his  
own site, and the URL for the font was "http://my_domain/fonts/monotype/Garamond/licensed-for-my_domain-only.ttf 
". Putting aside the burden you think this would cause authors to  
create, would that be acceptable use?

Received on Thursday, 25 June 2009 22:57:38 UTC