zaimoni
6/15/2008 9:28:00 PM
On Jun 15, 9:59 am, Gerry Quinn <ger...@indigo.ie> wrote:
> In article <29916418-97da-4ecf-b4ee-
> 52d272ab2...@y38g2000hsy.googlegroups.com>, zaim...@zaimoni.com says...
>
> > E.g., it is quite possible for a computer font to not be infringing
> > under U.S. law, but infringing under EU law. I don't recall the exact
> > details right now (and am not a lawyer), but I think it's
> > extrapolatable from U.S. law treating it as software [and thus the
> > good that is the virtual machine encoding is important], while the
> > general EU approach treats the font as it is rendered [so it merely
> > has to *replicate* the appearance of a copyright-protected font to
> > infringe].
>
> I'm inclined to doubt that US law would allow you to clone a font in
> such a fashion, but who knows... I woldn't do it anyway.
For website design implementation, Times New Roman (broadcast by
Microsoft, but not legal to modify from) is a reasonable solution for
common UNICODE characters, so I haven't actually needed to create a
font yet.
The problem, from my end, is that fonts are so *generic* that I need
as many layers of isolation from extant fonts as possible when I
finally do need one. [Just try visually seeing the difference between
Times New Roman and Times Roman at a reasonable size, for instance.]
As long as a good-faith effort to "look different" was made, a full
audit trail documenting that the font was created either <i>de novo</
i> or from a provably free font should be enough to U.S.-immunize.
[The EU standard is not positively verifiable without a full-blown
legal department.] (Nothing's going to save the legality of the font
if it was created using something like a PS2-TrueType converter;
distorting afterwards won't make a difference.)
Either a UNICODE-based roguelike needing exotic code points, or
finally deciding to add an extra layer of [sarcasm]copy protection[/
sarcasm] to my self-published PDF novel, would be enough to require a
font editor. (Adobe Acrobat forces you to do a font substitution if
it doesn't have the font used to create the PDF.) Unlike the DCMA, I
don't care about "piracy" as that's free marketing, but I do want
unauthorized copies to require excessive effort to alter.