2 ms·
Yes, and commercial vendors get compensated one way or another because they use social tools, the law, to enforce their law-provided control over their product.
by thwarted 18y ago
Yes, and commercial vendors get compensated one way or another because they use social tools, the law, to enforce their law-provided control over their product. Typeface vendors are welcome to do that too, using the law and not putting their trust in DRM, which is breakable, to enforce their control.
However, complaining that people who make their own product freely available, for whatever reason (be it for demo, ideological, political, etc purposes), is taking away compensation from those who don't make their product freely available doesn't help the cause to get people to pay for things, or their equivalents, they can otherwise get for free. Adobe charges high prices for their tools because they can, and people will pay because it is considered there are no better tools, free or otherwise. People pay for stock photos because it's actually easier and often cheaper to do so rather than risk having to deal with being caught not paying. Trying to convince the engineers who control the format to add DRM bits, which is what the OP was responding to, is exactly the wrong way to go about maintaining control and is a losing battle.
- zcrar70 18y ago> Typeface vendors are welcome to do that too, using the law That's almost completely impractical. How would you find out when someone steals your typeface? Image libraries and photo agencies face a similar problem (I used to work for one.)
- thwarted 18y agoPresumably, you have a licensed user list and you audit the use of your intellectual property. I can't help it that this is hard, but that's the only even remotely practical solution that isn't a false sense of security. Wishing that people don't infringe is extremely ineffective, especially when you have an extremely sharp sword, the law, at your disposal to assist with enforcement. Interestingly, one of the well known cases for keeping a trademark is that you make moves to protect it by stopping infringers. In some respects, it makes sense that those who want other, similar kinds of intellectual property protections be subject to the same requirements. Trademarks and copyrights both protect things that don't have hard physical manifestations that provide inherent limits on their reproducibility, so it may be reasonable that they are both afforded the same methods of protection.
- misuba 18y agoHow are you going to hide a @fontface call in your CSS file?
- tptacek 18y agoIt's just a filename. It can be anything.
- m_eiman 18y ago.. but it'll still be the same file. With checksums and binary diffs, not a big problem. There's even a business opportunity there!
- zcrar70 18y agowhat, and crawl the entire web to find infrigement? Or pay for someone else to do it - but then, how would you enforce it? The costs of hiring a lawyer to threaten to sue would be greater than the money made from selling the typeface.