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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I recently gained the same sentiment for different reasons. I decided to do (what I thought was) the right thing and buy a font directly from ITC. I chose the Mac option, being that I'm on a Mac.
Much to my surprise, the download arrives compressed as a Stuffit Expander file. SERIOUSLY? Looking at the FAQ they say they Stuffit Expander is the default compression format for Macs and is distributed with every Mac browser. When was the last time they bothered to check that? I can barely remember the last time I had Stuffit installed on my Mac and I've worked closely with 6 machines since 1999 (I seem to remember having it with 10.2 around 2003, but that may be wrong).
So, yes, fuck 'em. When Mark said, "They still think they’re in the business of shuffling little bits of metal around", it rang true for me.
the permission table he is talking about sounds like the copy-prevention bit in PDFs. it's up to the reader software to enforce it, and since PDF is mostly an "open" specification, many free readers simply ignore it or allow the user to override it.
but how are fonts any different than stock images? a designer/photographer creates a work, then licenses it to end users that are entitled to use it. if you have a license to a stock image, you can use it on your website. i can copy it and use it on my site, but that would be illegal. how is this different than fonts? if you have a license to use a font, use it. i can copy it and use it on my site, but that would be illegal.
sites using stock images illegally are often sued or fined and there are a number of companies that offer services to find these illegally used images, even ones that have been resized or altered.
with fonts it seems like it would be even easier to automate the process of crawling websites looking for a particular font file and checking the licensing of it, especially since the font files wouldn't be altered.
It's doubly tricky with fonts because typefaces have a complicated legal status. Typeface designs cannot be copyrighted, though individual implementations (i.e. ttf files) can be. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typeface#Legal_aspects
The question you want to be asking is if it will help anyone. The response to yours is yes, thousands of people. Google for anti-copyright for readings.
I'm familiar with the anti-copyright arguments, but my point was that it seems inconsistent to have copyright on so many types of creative works except typefaces.
So what happens when some big corporation has managed to lawyer their way to copyright over pretty much all basic font designs, and anything remotely sensible is close enough to be considered a derivative work? Now no-one can use writing to communicate. There is no sane universe in which a tax on writing is in the interests of society.
Font files, as in the programs that describe the shape of a font in vector or bitmap terms, are already copyrightable, but I think the US gets this one absolutely right by specifically excluding font designs from being monopolised.
If you're so cynical that you think someone could successfully claim copyright over stuff that's hundreds of years old, I think it's pointless to argue with you.
There are musical works that have been under copyright for longer than the average human lifetime. In most places, singing "Happy Birthday" to a child in the street is an infringement of copyright. Amazon successfully patented "one click". Other people have patented inventions that contradict the laws of physics as we know them. Mike Rowe got harassed by one of the largest and most recognisable brands in the world for making a joke out of the similarity between his name and theirs.
If you're so deluded as to think that common sense always works in the area of intellectual property law, I think it's pointless to argue with you.
Fonts are very different from stock images. They provide texture, not content: nobody goes to a web page to read 'Lorem Ipsum' written in an attractive font. I'd say a font is similar to the film stock on which a photo is shot. There are lots of cool and distinctive film stocks out there...but Kodak doesn't collect any royalties on the tasty silver halide look of an Ansel Adams photo.
Because the foundries are being included in a standards debate in which their own short-term interests are retarding long-term progress for everybody, and the implementors are working around that retardation in ways that are going to be disruptive for the foundries.
It's Christiansen all over again. We'll get dynamic fonts. They'll be crappy at first, because Adobe and Monotype (and FontFont and HFJ) aren't going to play ball. But there are enough hungry indies out there that we'll start getting good dynamic web fonts, and those will take over the world and screw Monotype.
Some font foundries won't sell you a Web license at any cost, and other foundries merely charge you an extortionate amount for a Web license. It's a cultural problem.
You can take the font from a web page, use it in Illustrator for printed material (still the bread and butter of foundries), stretch it just a bit so that its no longer in exactly the same proportions, and it becomes very hard to prove where the font came from.
I suspect the fear is not so much fonts being used on webpages, but fonts getting "out there" in general. I agree, though: probably an unfounded fear.
You are clearly not a graphic designer. Altering typeface proportions is the biggest no-no and the first sign of an amateur design botch-job. Just an FYI :-)
First, how do you take a bitmap from a web page, pull it into a vector program, and resize it without redrawing the entire font?
Second, I think you'd be surprised by how good trained designers are at spotting typefaces. "Stretch out" Helvetica a bit, and a trained eye is going to know you just mutilated Helvetica.
No, the whole thing we're talking about here is embedding the font files in the webpage so that we can finally use whatever font we want as a typeface.
I have no doubt that a trained typographer can identify fonts at 100 paces in a hurricane, but if he sees his font in printed material, contacts the publisher and says "That's my font" and the publisher says "No it's not" what is his recourse? He'd have to get some kind of order to search the publisher, or otherwise demand that the publisher prove that its a different font. How do you convince a judge that two fonts are the same, without superimposing them? Does "Look at the serifs!" hold up? I'm not saying that its impossible to prove the origin of a font, just that it gets a lot harder once you leave the digital world.
This is at least partially a reaction to the Linux community's tricks to get fonts. Some people in the Linux community wrote a program to automatically download and install Microsoft's TrueType Font Collection fonts after installation. That way, Linux can use all the fonts that Microsoft spent millions of dollars designing, Linux itself isn't affected by the fonts' license, nobody in the Linux community has to spend resources to design decent fonts, and the user isn't hassled much.
All the font foundries saw that and said "we will never allow that to happen again"--especially since the intersection between their customers and Linux users is nearly the empty set. Their proposed solution is to allow embedding only if the font files on the servers are covered by the DMCA. That is why there is a trivial obsfucation of the font information in the EOT specification. If somebody distributes a program to scrape a bunch of fonts of the web and install them onto a person's computer, they can use the DMCA to take the program down (just as the movie industry did with DeCSS). It isn't 100% effective, but it does help prevent casual piracy. The copy-protection bits of EOT are a lost cause in the long run. But, they will be somewhat effective in the short run. That is just like DeCSS--the first couple of years, it was difficult for an inexperienced user to find a trustworthy DeCSS program with a usable interface.
I support EOT because Microsoft already made it the de-facto standard in 1997, and Microsoft already said they won't implement TTF linking in IE. That means that if other browsers don't implement EOT, we will always have the hassle of having separate font files for IE and other browsers. That is silly. It is the other browsers' fault that they have been so lethargic to implement font linking. Now, 12 years later they finally implement it, but in an incompatible way. Then they turn around and blame Microsoft for having a 12-year-old implementation that is incompatible with their nubile mechanism. Who wins at that game? Only people who value smugness over productivity.
> This is at least partially a reaction to the Linux community's tricks to get fonts. Some people in the Linux community wrote a program to automatically download and install Microsoft's TrueType Font Collection fonts after installation.
This is true, but perhaps misleading since it misses an important point.
The font downloader is legal according to the licensing terms:
DeCSS didn't help prevent casual piracy. It helped prevent people from legally watching DVDs they had bought on linux because they wouldn't license it, and it was illegal to reverse engineer it.
So what did all those tech savvy people who were being actively snubbed by the movie industry do? They bittorrented pre-ripped movie files instead of buying DVDs that were somewhere between awkward and impossible to use. Another classic foot-shooting move from the movie industry.
CSS did help prevent casual piracy. Before DeCSS was released, it was very effective. Immediately after DeCSS was released, it was still pretty inconvenient to pirate a DVD, even for somebody that knew what to look for. Even now most people wouldn't be able to rip a DVD.
CSS doesn't have anything to do with the popularity of bittorrent. CDs (which have no DRM) are extremely popular on bittorrent as well.
Also, you should blame your Linux vendor for making it hard to watch DVDs. I have used many Linux-based products that have licensed CSS and have built-in DVD support from the start. Windows and Mac OS X also have no problem with DVDs. If your vendor isn't giving you DVD support then switch to a different vendor.
Their purpose is undermined by the fact that they don't even use @font-face on their own site. The could have and should have, given that the first specified face in the stylesheet is "Nimbus Sans", a free font.
What I actually see on visiting Open Font Library is the headline "Typefaces we can all share" in Helvetica Neue, a typeface that in fact we cannot all share.
1. Typefaces take a long time to develop - design, create, package. The process can take years.
2. Typefaces have a value. If they didn't people would be content just using Arial.
3. People that do this work should be compensated.
4. Trying to figure out a solution to this problem, both from a customers and creators view is more beneficial than the "fuck this, fuck that" rhetoric in the blog post.
"Typefaces have a value. If they didn't people would be content just using Arial."
His point is that the commercial model has an enormous number of technical issues. Clearly, free fonts provide value in their technical superiority that overrides any aesthetic superiority of commercial fonts.
1. Operating Systems take a long time to develop. The process can take years.
2. Operating Systems have a value. If they didn't people would be content just using punch cards.
3. People that do this work should be compensated.
4. Trying to figure out a solution to this problem, both from a customers and creators view is more beneficial than the "fuck this, fuck that" rhetoric among linux nerds.
I apologize for the snark. My point is that there's a striking similarity here. There are some arguments that Windows is superior to Linux, and once upon a time, those arguments might've been valid. They're not any more. It's crazy these days to plunk down $300 for Vista when Ubuntu is better, and free in every way.
Quantity leads to quality—even if the average free font is much worse than the average proprietary font, a few of them will be very good, and will gain a lot of usage.
There may still be a place for proprietary fonts. But the web will embrace the more open option. If the foundries want a piece of that action, they're going to have to change the way they do things.
You seem to be living in a world that does not have much to do with reality. It's not "crazy" to pay $300 for Vista when the programs you know are on Vista. People are paying $300 right this moment to not have to use Ubuntu.
Quantity does not lead to quality - if it did everyone would be using open source web design. Why are they not?
In the contest between Windows and Ubuntu, almost everybody chooses Windows (a small minority chooses Windows non-free competitor OS X). This fact is inconvenient to your argument.
I don't know, I see people beginning to use linux in my social circle, even non-technical users. Would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago. Nothing scientific here but I get the definite impression linux is gaining momentum.
MacOSX user here btw, not a desktop linux zealot at all, just reporting what I see anecdotally.
The best thing MS could do for linux is perfect its anti-piracy strategy. If it was impossible to pirate Windows, Linux would explode I reckon.
So web usage is comparable, but Vista seems to be well ahead. At the same time I suspect that deployments are quite a bit different than web usage, so take that with a grain of salt.
I would imagine that the total worldwide number of desktop Linux installations is statistically insignificant. Vista has never really taken hold, and XP is still the dominant OS by some way, but I've never seen a study that put desktop Linux even on the same order of magnitude as OS X.
If you look at the links posted above, the w3schools.com numbers, 4% and 6%, are not even a binary order of magnitude apart, never mind the usually meant decimal (10x spread).
The w3counter.com numbers are 2% and 5%. Both single digits (hint).
There are whole companies out there doing engineering work on Linux, except for a few odd laptops. Actually, site http proxies may cause Unix web undercount (i.e. stats are dominated by home access, presumably with lower Unix use).
Do you seriously believe that the visitors to a site like w3schools.com are even close to representative of the population as a whole?
There are indeed whole companies out there doing engineering work on Linux; I've worked with some of them. But they are a tiny fraction of all companies, and the desktops in most companies run Windows. Of those that don't, I'm sure Linux has had a few big successes, but Apple sells all those computers to someone. As I said, I've never seen a study that puts Linux even close. If you've got more up-to-date information that is actually representative, go ahead and share it, but please don't pretend that the server log from a random web site is a real study.
Sure, but there has been this stalemate between font foundries and web designers for well over 10 years.
I think this whole @font-face (1) thing is exactly what is needed to shake some sense into the foundries. Designers will start using the fonts they love, without needing to create a graphic, then the foundries will start freaking out and (hopefully) innovate new, standards-based methods of using a designer-chosen font without sacrificing the usage rights of said font.
As a slightly different argument, using a font via @font-face is no different than using a graphic. Graphics can have usage permissions associated with them just like a font, so why do we need to invent a new means of distributing licensed fonts?
"innovate new, standards-based methods of using a designer-chosen font without sacrificing the usage rights of said font."
Innovation can only do what is possible. If the font foundries want it to be physically impossible to "steal" the font, there is simply no way to square that with making the font available over the web for the purpose of rendering it, without sacrificing too much usability to make it worth doing. Maybe IE can do it (although even then only dangerously, if you want it to be really secure), but there's no way to make it possible for Firefox, KHTML, and other open source browsers to use the font, but impossible to download it. They're just too open for that. And any solution based on leaving them out in the cold is rapidly becoming infeasible as IE may still have market share, but is very nearly the last closed-source browser of any significant still standing.
Leave the handwaving of "innovative" solutions to impossible problems to the government.
You don't have to make it impossible, just awkward enough that (a) there is some incentive to pay up for the real thing, and more importantly (b) casual users who don't even know what copyright says or that ripping is illegal can't Just Do It.
It would probably suffice to develop a standard where only an embedded subset of the font was transmitted by the web server, so you couldn't just download and install the .otf file or equivalent. That would probably save a worthwhile amount of bandwidth with modern fonts and their huge file sizes, too.
As it stands right now, you do, because the font foundries won't stand for anything less. If they were happy with probabilities they would have been in the game a long time ago.
Note this is a social thing, not a technical thing.
My point was just that there is scope for a middle ground, where commercial font developers have some basic protection against drive-by copying but there is nothing so stupid and inhibiting that it prevents practical use of the fonts. Those foundries that choose not to work with such a scheme will inevitably find themselves at a commercial disadvantage relative to those that choose to do so.
Maybe someone should take a tip from the scientists and game developers behind Fold It!, the protein folding "game," and create a simple Flash web game that lets players hint and kern open fonts a letter at a time.
I'm not sure you understand the sheer scale of the task that is creating a good font set. Professionals often spend years going from an idea to a full font family with a good glyph complement, and it's not getting any easier now that internationalised character sets and OpenType wizardry are the norm rather than a bonus.
I'm not underestimating the amount of effort it takes to create a good typeface. I'm saying that the market value of making one of your faces free/embeddable is likely to be high enough that at least a few indies (not "open source" font dorks, but people like David Březina, who don't have a permanent home at FF or HFJ or Adobe) will release their work --- because why not?
That's basically the same as the "this is the year of Linux on the desktop" argument. I won't hold my breath. Open source end-user products always seem to improve at a snails pace.
There are enough differences that I don't think your analogy holds water. One could just as well use the analogy of linking to Wikipedia as a citation rather than some proprietary site behind a paywall. The former has clearly won in the general case.
Well, go check out the fonts. Some of them are nice. I'll use them.
People do actually upgrade their browsers these days. The browsers yell at them if they don't. The next versions of Firefox, Safari, Opera, and IE all support it. It's only a year or so off (probably less if you don't wait for IE6/7 to go away.)
No, lets be realistic. They will be crappy, they will be everywhere, they will define people's expectations of "what a font is". It's like Ikea versus hand-carved artisan furniture, the real stuff just doesn't compare, but nobody you're likely to meet could afford it, and the bolt-together ticky-tacky does the job (or fails, but people are so used to the fail they work around it).
dudes, get real. I can read the web just fine. Who cares about this? There isn't even enough resolution on my screen to tell the difference between a good font and a great one.
This reminds me of when drummers got all weepy because of drum machines. When your scene is done, it's time to gracefully exit the stage.
There isn't even enough resolution on my screen to tell the difference between a good font and a great one.
A decade ago, when 1024x768 on a 17" monitor was doing OK and high quality icons were 32x32 in 256 colours, they might have said the same thing. Today, screens with twice that pixel count aren't unusual, and everyone from operating systems to web sites is using much more detailed icons.
By the same token, low resolution screens are one of the places where the difference between a good font and a great font really stands out. It's not the same difference you'd see on paper out of a 2400dpi printer. In fact, the qualities that make a font good for screen use are quite different to those that make a font good for print use. But to maximise the visual appeal and, more importantly, the legibility and readability of text on screen in a world where on-screen reading is increasingly taking over from other media, we need people who understand how to achieve the best results with what precious screen real estate we have.
Alas, as with most things in graphic design and typography, good work is rarely noticed because it's good work, while bad work is rarely noticed because people don't know the difference (but still read slower, make more mistakes, and get tired sooner).
People who didn't know graphical design learned it to do web pages. Perhaps people who don't know typographical design will learn it to do fonts in web pages?
wow. What an overreaction from Mark Pilgrim[1]. While sound & fury may grab eyeballs, he is ignoring solutions already in front of his face[2].
The Solution
==============
I worked with fonts and licensing all the time in a previous job, generating automated artwork. The big thing missing in Open Source [his 'usable'] fonts is kerning and hinting.
There is nothing stopping someone setting up a Kern-or-Not? website where web people vote on which kerning values look best, and incorporating that data set into an OSS font foundry[3].
I already did some of this myself to kern HTML using spans with negative margins. To get excellent results you only need a few key characters [in English]. I used Web fonts, but made up the kerning offsets by trial and error. There is nothing stopping other people doing the same [see 2].
'T', 'W' are the big offenders. You can get excellent results concentrating on these and all the vowels.
T e , T o , T y , T i , T e, W * etc. This is not exhaustive.
-------------------------
[1] I came across his emails all the time when I was working on the OSS Greasemonkey in the early days of its development. He threatened the lead dev with 'forking the project and working on it until the day I die' if the project did not take a direction he wanted. I believe it was another of one of the fequent LGPL/GPL arguments that whirlwind in many OSS projects. The mailing list greasemonkey-[user|dev] doesn't seem to include such old emails [c 2005], so no link, sorry.
[2] Mark seems to prefer that other people fix the problems under his guidance.
[3] May I suggest Public Domain for the dataset to avoid horrendous license choice debates?
He said he'd fork greasemonkey & maintain it if the official greasemonkey started informing websites of its presence(which would presumably allow them to target different content at greasemonkey users, or try to circumvent it, etc.). I hardly think that's an unreasonable position.
I haven't been around other projects when someone threatened to fork it 'until the day I die', so I don't know how the tone comes across then.
The context was general discussion of architectural / license issues. It seemed at the time like Mark went for the Nuclear [fork] option very, very early on in the discussion. I can only imagine what it felt like for the lead devs, but it cannot have been good. Unreasonable - borderline; rude, counterproductive - yes.
This is all from my memory in 2005, without list logs to refresh.
It might be great in print but it is horrible on-screen. Generally italic faces should be avoided on the web whenever possible. Failing that, it is much better to use one that was designed specifically for on-screen use, like one of the Microsoft C* fonts.
The CSS may ask for an oblique, but on my Mac, which ships with Gill Sans, I get an italic. Just to be pendantic. Obliques are slanted faces; italics are slanted faces with cursive letterforms.
I realise that was meant to be a joke, but that's exactly the sort of dramatic shift in sales and marketing tactics that might keep the major foundries relevant.
Look at how many people have their own blog, or MySpace page, or otherwise have created a little world of their own design on the Web.
Look at how successful iTunes and the like have been in selling music conveniently, reliably, and at a price that doesn't make someone who wants that music think twice and look for a free but illegal copy elsewhere.
I don't think selling fonts very cheaply via these sorts of channels and/or partnering deals with the major social networking/blog services is such a crazy idea. Different, yes. Unknown, sure. But not crazy.
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.