Re: question

Thanks again. Well, this is a fascinating
topic. I was hoping that WOFF would be secure enough so that nobody could
actually do that, converting it back to a desktop format. I'm asking for
my company. We're a publishing company and I think that it would be great
if we had more power over fonts over the web. I have a favorite type designer
up in NYC, but, I don't think they're open, yet, to enabling this technology.
So, we're still limited as to what fonts we could even do this with.

Cheers,

Peter

Christopher Slye <[email protected]>

09/28/2010 01:06 PM

To

Peter Bailey <[email protected]>

cc

"[email protected]" <[email protected]>

Subject

Re: question

Obviously you don't need a license to use the font
if you're the owner. You'r free to convert the font to WOFF and serve it
to a web browser.

WOFF is a kind of delivery format, but the (proposed) standard is open,
so the process of converting a WOFF back to a desktop font is well documented.
It's not quite as easy as unzipping, but it's not strong protection. WOFF
is more of a deterrent: Anyone who takes the WOFF off your server and wants
to convert it to a desktop font will have to do so deliberately.

This situation is not unique to fonts. Many different kinds of intellectual
property are already delivered via the web, and can be misused or stolen
by unscrupulous people. Any foundry or font owner should be aware of that
risk when they make a font available on the web.

-Christopher

On Sep 28, 2010, at 9:29 AM, Peter Bailey wrote:

>

> Thanks for your response. If my company owns the license to a font,
though, and obviously our customers don't, would the license be broken
if we propagate the font out via our web site to them? I thought that the
"font-face" element in CSS3 already allowed for the downloading
of fonts. WOFF is doing the same, but, the fonts are zipped up in some
way. Can the end user unzip them to their heart's content and thereby steal
them from us?