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Comment by huhtenberg | Hacker News Reader

I frequent typophile.com, which is the online community of font designers, and the topic of online font distribution and "alternative licensing" surfaces every single month.

My takeaway from these conversations that the designers are (a) technically clueless (b) conservative (c) and, pardon my French, scared sh*tless of losing control over their fonts.

Latter is especially ironic, because they have no control to begin with. So the general sentiments are exactly what is described in that quoted interview - they expect someone to develop a magic bit and a DRM to enforce it and then suddenly things will get much better.

Also just to illustrate the level of conservatism - someone who decides to offer 1 font from a family of 10 for free is viewed as a revolutionary dude with the balls of steel. Everyone enthusiastically cheers for him, but noone follows.

In the end, it is really sad to see them burying their heads in the sand next to the music industry.

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This is absurd. I also frequent typophile and these are not the sentiments or the characteristics I've seen.

Technically clueless? The entire disciple is technical by nature. People use and create their own tools as a matter of course, Python being the more popular language because of the RoboFab library.

No one has a problem with "losing control" of the work they created, they just want to be compensated for it like a reasonable human being.

> Technically clueless? The entire disciple is technical by nature. People use and create there own tools..

Sure, there are some people who do that, but they are hardly a majority. But that's beside the point. Most importantly - they are conservative as hell and unwilling to experiment with licensing. Here's a very interesting thread on the subject, and do tell me you are not getting the vibe I am describing:

http://typophile.com/node/54558

No one has a problem with "losing control" of the work they created, they just want to be compensated for it like a reasonable human being.

This would seem to be contradicting itself. If you accept that control will be lost, then how can you accept that you'll be able to control that people will compensate you?

And I'd venture to say that if you're unable to recognize that piracy is a social problem that does not have a technical solution, then you may qualify for being technically clueless in the context huhtenberg is talking about.

There needs to be "Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem Response" document for DRM implementation attempts.

You're way outside the debate here. Commercial typeface vendors are going to get compensated one way or the other. There's no DRM on a JPG from Getty or Corbis, but you'd be made of stupid to steal a commercial stock photo for your promotional material.

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.

> 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.)

Presumably, 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.

How are you going to hide a @fontface call in your CSS file?

It's just a filename. It can be anything.

.. but it'll still be the same file. With checksums and binary diffs, not a big problem. There's even a business opportunity there!

what, 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.

  > There's no DRM on a JPG from Getty or Corbis

Yes there are... all those jpegs are watermarked. And people STILL steal them ALL THE TIME:

http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/search/label/watermar...

I think tptacek was referring to the purchased images, not the free low-resolution samples that they show for free online.

Yeah I agree with you about the nature of the discipline. I have no idea about its practitioners, but the craft can be very technichal.

Metamagical Themas (by Douglas Hofstadter) has several interesting problems concerning font and typography. For example, scale can be a problem. It would be relatively easy to design a good letter in a large font size. It gets more difficult when you are trying to scale that letter down to the tiny font sizes.

Online font use is extremely public. Wouldn't it be easy to just license fonts per domain and then crawl to see who's using it without a license?

Dynamic web fonts are the most enforceable copyright there is. With a reasonable fee structure this could be a huge new source of revenue for font designers, and a big new tool for web designers.

Right. "Hide the font" and "use the font" exclude each other, when the name of the font has to be right there in the style-sheet!

the name of the font has to be right there in the style-sheet

With @font-face declarations, actually, you can name a font whatever you want, and point it at a file on your server that is named whatever you want.

Is there anywhere else online that font designers gather? I'm interested, but I just spent about 30 minutes on Typophile.com and I'm going to need a site that's a little less, erm, Flash-tastic.

Maybe http://ilovetypography.com/ ?

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