David Berlow on A List Apart on Webfonts

[mike_duggan]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

Real Fonts on the Web: An Interview with The Font Bureau's David Berlow
by DAVID BERLOW, JEFFREY ZELDMAN

http://alistapart.com/articles/realfontsontheweb

[Dunwich Type]

I still fail to see what how a permissions table accomplishes anything in regard to protecting web fonts from misuse. What is the point if someone will just publish a tool to alter the permissions table at will?

[Dan Gayle]

@James
It might prevent the widespread use of non-licensed fonts on the web for 95% of the people. The other 5% are scumbags anyways, who have probably stolen the font to begin with, along with the stolen font-editing software.

[Dan Gayle]

I love how the "We have a standard that is now supported in Firefox and Safari…" question was either a) completely mis-interpreted or b) completely ignored.

Zeldman was obviously speaking of the "new" @font-face, but Berlow responded with attacks on the Zen Garden. Shame on you David!

[Dunwich Type]

It might prevent the widespread use of non-licensed fonts on the web for 95% of the people.

Exactly how does it do that? Is the assumption that 95% of people who would want to use fonts without a proper license are too lazy/stupid/technically inept to download a tool that alters the permissions as needed? It seems to me that if people are willing and able to crack dongled software and use registration key generators they’ll have to trouble tweaking a font.

[William Berkson]

James, I think David's concept is that web crawlers or spiders can be used to find fonts put on a server, when the site owner hasn't bought a license. They could be easily caught if they change just the permissions table, but not the name.

If they changed both the table and name it would be harder to do automatically, but people might report them if it's public, and also there's the 'what the font' matching software stuff.

Being a crook and using the web is a very risky undertaking for the crook, as it seems the new "Dr. Jeckle and Mr. Hyde" in Boston has just found out.

The main thing is that if you put it on the web, it's very public, and so a big risk if there is serious enforcement. Of course, with countries that allow crookedness on the internet, you aren't going to be able to get at them. But other places you will.

[Dan Gayle]

@James
You think that 95% of the people designing web sites are all willing to crack software? There is a large difference between someone downloading softwares and someone who has to go out of their way to intentionally find a way to crack open said softwares. I assume.

The moral barrier between using something that you think is free and something you know darn well isn't free, I think, is enough to dissuade a good majority of the people.

[aluminum]

Some industries still believe copyright protection can be handled via technology. Some industries have gotten over that. I'm guessing it's a natural cycle of every industry as it tries to embrace the web.

"The moral barrier between using something that you think is free and something you know darn well isn’t free, I think, is enough to dissuade a good majority of the people."

I agree.

[Dunwich Type]

William, I don’t believe that enough font vendors are in a position to follow up with lawsuits that it will really matter. And even if one has the financial resources to file the suits, does one have the time?

Dan, I thought you meant it would prevent 95% of piracy, not that 95% of web designers would use cracked software. And I’m not sure that the moral barrier is really an issue. Designers could have been using EOT without licenses for years—most web users have been on IE for a long time. If EULAs have stopped accidental EOT use up to now, why assume it will suddenly change with the shift to @font-face?

[William Berkson]

James, it only takes one successful lawsuit--and probably not even that is necessary--for a letter from a lawyer to get somebody's attention. If they get a letter saying "Congratulations you are our customer, here's the bill", which is what I heard DB say at at TypeCon is his approach, then they are likely to pay up rather than risk a law suit. And one of the big boys, like MS, Adobe, Apple, may well join in a lawsuit to establish the principle, if there's an issue affecting them at stake, which would be the case here.

[joeclark]

The open-source ideologue with a cruel-and-nasty streak, Mark Pilgrim, points out that “your” fonts are better than “[his]” fonts in every way but one.

—
Joe Clark
http://joeclark.org/

[William Berkson]

Heh heh. Joe, the censor-bot is messing up your link, as it contains the famous f-word.

It is current here.

I'm not clear on whether the permissions table would have to interact with browsers, as Mark Pilgrim says. And if so, how big a deal this is.

Perhaps David Berlow could explain more how his concept is supposed to work.

[Dunwich Type]

…it only takes one successful lawsuit—and probably not even that is necessary—for a letter from a lawyer to get somebody’s attention.

The experiences of the RIAA, the MPAA, Microsoft, Nintendo, etc. suggest otherwise. There have been plenty of successful lawsuits, and piracy just keeps on happening. The notion that font DRM and lawsuits will stop piracy is a fantasy. It won’t stop font piracy anymore than sticking pins in a map of Sweden will.

[William Berkson]

James, this is fundamentally different because the song you have on your computer is not public. The font on a web site is. Maybe it still won't work, I don't know enough to judge, but it is different.

Stephen Coles notes that Tal Leming has weighed in on this. Is his proposal the same as Berlow's?

[Dunwich Type]

James, this is fundamentally different because the song you have on your computer is not public. The font on a web site is.

So the big difference between the proposed font situation and the existing situations with other media that it’s easier for font designers to sue a pirate because the infringing font is on a public server? Because a few font vendors claim that they have the time, money, and inclination to try and recover money from pirates via lawyers does not justify the inevitable DMCA (or other law outside the USA) violation lawsuits that arise when a software is released without the DRM system and font vendors decide that it constitutes a circumvention device. It doesn’t justify the resources programmers will waste coding an ineffective DRM system into their work to avoid getting sued. It doesn’t justify the hoops end-users will have to jump through when the DRM fails to work properly.

Font vendors who choose to pursue font DRM do so at their own peril, because in the end it’s just going to end up pissing a lot of people off. That “**** THE FOUNDRIES” post was just a start—think about what will happen when somebody sues a Linux distro that includes DRM-free web browsers and web font creation and editing tools. Font vendors are eventually going to have to realize that the only solution to the problem is accepting that some piracy will always happen and finding ways to exploit it to their advantage.

Tal Leming has weighed in on this. Is his proposal the same as Berlow’s?

It sounds like it, but only Dave can say for sure.

[Tal Leming]

Tal Leming has weighed in on this. Is his proposal the same as Berlow’s?

It sounds like it, but only Dave can say for sure.

Or I can.

No, they are not the same. David is proposing changes for multiple font formats that are much larger in scope than what I'm proposing. My post details slight tweaks to the OpenType specification.

[Dunwich Type]

Another thing worth noting is that while fonts are fundamentally different from other media formats, DRM is not. The differences between the proposed simple font DRM systems and the convoluted encryption and watermarking systems used for music are not relevant to DRM’s pernicious impact on the freedoms of programmers. Once a font DRM system is in place, it becomes illegal to circumvent it in some countries. This opens programmers up to civil and/or criminal suits for writing an application that renders text. I’ll admit that nobody is asking for the kind of control that media conglomerates have attempted to emplace. But there are still a few litigious screwballs, not to mention overzealous prosecutors, who could really ruin somebody’s day.

Further, I want to reiterate something that came up when this debate was had on the ATypI list last year. A vendor does not need any kind of font DRM system in place to crawl the web for license violators. As long as a vendor has a list of web domains with a legitimate license, he can still go after anyone using the fonts without a license. If the ability to catch violators is important, that can be had today, using @font-face, sIFR, EOT, Typeface.JS, and Cufón.

[joeclark]

I can’t read the type on Tal’s page (though I could read Kaypro, Hyperion, and Victor 9000 screens just fine). I’ll have to load it in Lynx later maybe.

—
Joe Clark
http://joeclark.org/

[Thomas Phinney]

@Tal: "David is proposing changes for multiple font formats that are much larger in scope than what I’m proposing."

How so? He doesn't go into much detail, but his brief mention of adding a new set of embedding bits doesn't seem "larger in scope" to me. Different, but not larger in scope than adding URLs and scrambling the beginning of the file. Arguably smaller in scope than Sampo's proposal which you are backing.

BTW, Dave B lists four font formats. But two of them aren't font formats at all (FreeType and CoolType), and the distinction between TrueType and OpenType is rather razor-thin. Windows TrueType has evolved into OpenType. I suppose Apple probably maintains their TrueType spec, though.

Dave B also has the wrong target: it would be easy to get something like this added to the OpenType/OFF spec. The difficult hurdle is getting it accepted by the W3C. Sampo's proposal was already rejected by quite a few W3C members.

Then again, maybe the most effective thing to do is to get the info into the font spec(s), and then press the browser makers to respect those specs. Getting them to do *anything* more than raw desktop fonts on web servers on their own has been a lost cause to date.

Cheers,

T

[bowerbird]

tai, just a few points on your post,
which sounds fairly reasonable...

...except...

> The person can license the font
> to give the designer the respect
> he/she deserves for creating something
> that the person likes and wants to use.

is this about _respect_? or _cash_?
never mind, it's a rhetorical question.

> I think this could be done in a way that
> honors all of the work that we’ve done to
> create the fonts that people want to use.

there's that "want to use" phrase again...

> Say you have a blog and you want to use
> a font from the XYZ foundry for headlines
> on your site. You go to the foundry’s website,
> you enter the domain that your font will be
> used for, you buy a web embedding license
> for a small fee, you download the web font file
> and you put it on your site.

and again, "want to use".

the thing is, people might want a variety of fonts,
but they ain't gonna be willing to _pay_ for them.

they won't necessarily question your "right" to
charge money for fonts, and they certainly won't
argue with you that it might take a lot of time to
create a good font, and they would agree that
you deserve to be compensated for your time...

but -- in the end -- they won't want to pay...
because it's just not that _important_ to them.
they will use whatever free font they have now.
they don't "want to use" your font all that badly.

just like they _want_ the hometown daily paper,
but they don't want it badly enough to subscribe,
not at the price that would keep that newspaper
in the black and laying ink on paper every day...

so even if you win the right-to-charge battle,
you might lose the actually-getting-paid war.

which might mean you shouldn't even bother
to fight that particular battle, but rather instead
engage a different strategy so you win the war...

-bowerbird

[Tal Leming]

Thomas,

@Tal: "David is proposing changes for multiple font formats that are much larger in scope than what I’m proposing."

How so? He doesn’t go into much detail, but his brief mention of adding a new set of embedding bits doesn’t seem "larger in scope" to me. Different, but not larger in scope than adding URLs and scrambling the beginning of the file. Arguably smaller in scope than Sampo’s proposal which you are backing.

From what I understand, David is proposing a new table to be added to the OpenType (and therefore OFF) and TrueType (does anyone even maintain the TTF specification anymore?) specifications. This table would be, and I'm guessing based on his vague statements here, similar to EEULAA. He is proposing that everything should immediately start honoring the bits in this new table.

The only change to the OpenType specification that I'm proposing is a single addition of a bit to fsType in OS/2. That's a backwards compatible change that doesn't require any support from font managers, applications or OSes. The only things that would need to understand this bit would be browsers, theoretical web authoring tools that work with web fonts and, of course, new font editors. Those applications are in the early stages of developing web font support, so this won't require a big change. The second thing my proposal does is to offer support to Sampo's idea for a web specific font format. The differences between this format and the OpenType format (the root table and the first 100 bytes) would not be rolled back into the OpenType specification and this new format would require only changes from applications that are still in the early phases of supporting web fonts.

My point is that the time that it will take to get a new table out of the concept stage and get it approved for inclusion in the OpenType specification will likely be longer than the lifespan of the working group that will decide the direction of web fonts.

bowerbird,

is this about _respect_? or _cash_?
never mind, it’s a rhetorical question.

For me, it is about respect first. It's disheartening when I spend a year designing a typeface and then have someone explicitly or implicitly tell me, "I can do what I want with this and you can't do anything about it!" The "_cash_" part you mentioned only comes up when I need to pay my bills. If you seriously think that anyone becomes a professional type designer in order to get rich, you are quite mistaken.

there’s that "want to use" phrase again...

I'm sorry, but I don't want to engage in a philosophical discussion about conflicting human desires. That's above my pay grade.

[dezcom]

Thanks, Tal!

ChrisL

[William Berkson]

Thanks for your work on this Tal, and explaining it further here.

I don't know what solution is good, but I do know that the current situation of producers not getting paid is not sustainable. We are seeing it now dramatically and writ large in the case of newspapers collapsing, and online news places not being able to pay reporters as print media did. Something in the way the web operates has to change, and in a direction that rewards producers.

W3C ignoring the needs of font designers reminds me of Hillary Clinton excluding the doctors from discussions of what the future health system should be.

Hmmm. Maybe we need a "Harry and Louise" video :)

[Dan Gayle]

That whole thread with it's comments makes me really not like certain aspects of the FOSS community. The vitriol should be bottled up and sold as anti-fungal medicine.

[aluminum]

I like what Tal is saying, but I don't think it really resolves the bigger issues. As stated, it really doesn't make it difficult to circumvent and, as such, doesn't really do much to actually protect the type designer via any technical method (which is par for the course in the world of DRM).

I appreciate the want of the type industry to somehow manage how fonts are used on web sites. I don't have a solution, though. And I don't think DRM will ultimately be a solution either.

It seems that the issue can be distilled down to the following:

Type designers...
- don't want people freely copying their fonts
- (some) would like additional $$$ for use on web sites (and PDFs)

Web designers...
- would like to use fonts they purchase online just as they do on paper
- don't want to deal with another layer of technology to get it to work (DRM)

Ultimately I don't think there is a solution that will appease all of the above bullet points. So, there'll likely be some EULAs that favor the web designer and some that favor the type designer and we'll have to see where things end up in a few years.