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Adobe gets burned by the DMCA
Adobe Systems, which famously used the DMCA to get Dmitry Sklyarov arrested
last year, has found itself on the other side of that law. It seems that a
couple of font foundaries, ITC and Agfa Monotype, have invoked the DMCA in
an attempt to shut down the ability of Adobe's Acrobat software to embed
fonts in PDF files. Adobe has now filed suit in
U.S. District Court asserting its rights to embed the fonts, and asking for
a declaration that Acrobat does not violate the DMCA. What goes around
comes around...but if enough situations like this one come up, we might
eventually get some serious pressure for changes in the DMCA.
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Adobe gets burned by the DMCA Posted Sep 4, 2002 17:55 UTC (Wed) by Schneelocke (guest, #3535) [Link] "Die ich rief die Geister - werd' ich nun nicht los." I can't exactly say I feel sorry for Adobe...
Adobe gets burned by the DMCA Posted Sep 4, 2002 18:13 UTC (Wed) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link] While I'd love to see Adobe have to eat their own crow, this whole issue really worries me.In the early days of PDF proliferation (i.e. a couple of years ago), it wasn't too uncommon to get a PDF file where the fonts weren't embedded, and if you didn't have the font you needed on disk, there were big blank spots in PDF files. Nowadays, though, people have gotten trained that fonts should be fully embedded everywhere in PDF files. This is good; it means that PDF files really live up to the P in their name: they're portable. A given PDF file can pretty much be viewed anywhere you've got a reader. If all the companies start suing each other and crying DMCA fouls, however, it's very easy to see what will happen. There will be large sets of fonts which aren't embeddable. However, just as web designers go for what's pretty without any thought of usability for the modem user, document designers are going to use the fonts they have to make the document look pretty without any thought to whether or not the document is truly portable. Worse, Windows will then licence most of the fonts that people want to use (or, at least, there will be a "standard" set that every Windows user has), so those PDF files *will* work on every Windows system. Users of free software will be out in the cold. The PDF files won't work on their systems, but the people producing them won't care because they've tested it on Windows, and Windows users make up the lion's share of the audience anyway. I predict that all this cross-lawyering will lead to a situation where there are a lot of PDF files out there which are de facto platform dependent, and unreadable on OSes which don't pay to licence various fonts. It will be very sad compared to today's world, where most of the documents you find have the fonts they need embedded. -Rob
Free fonts Posted Sep 4, 2002 18:44 UTC (Wed) by crow (guest, #96) [Link] Does this mean that we can get free fonts from PDF files?To be fair about it, we should only grab fonts out of PDF files distributed by the copyright holders of the fonts in question. The most likely candidates for such use would be files from Microsoft and Apple. And it's legal--they own the fonts, they gave them to us, and they didn't even have a click-through license on them.
Free fonts Posted Sep 5, 2002 12:58 UTC (Thu) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link] Well, most of those documents won't include the whole font -- just the subset containing the characters used in the document. This is particularly important with unicode fonts (think about the size of a document that used one or two characters each from 5 unicode fonts, if it needed to include the full fonts).Of course, even if you did get enough documents to put together a usable subset of the font, you still wouldn't have a license to use it in your documents.
Adobe gets burned by the DMCA Posted Sep 4, 2002 18:51 UTC (Wed) by macemoneta (guest, #2717) [Link] Is embedding a font fair use? Can copying an entire copyrighted work for distribution to thousands of other people be considered fair use? Is copying a font any different than copying an MP3 or a movie or a book?No, it's not any different. All these things are done for convenvience. Unfortunately, they are a necessary evil, for entirely legitimate purposes. Can they be used improperly? Of course, almost anything created by humans can be used improperly. As more and more companies come to realize that they too have a claim under the more recent convolutions of copyright, there'll be an increasing blaze of litigious activity. The ONLY ones that will win in this are the lawyers that started the whole mess. BOTH the companies that hold the copyrights and those that would use their products will suffer. Put the life of a copyright back at 10-15 years, and we'll see real prosperity from real innovation again. And don't get me started on the patents...
Adobe gets burned by the DMCA Posted Sep 4, 2002 20:26 UTC (Wed) by steven97 (guest, #2702) [Link] IMHO, embedding a font *is* fair use. It's not very different from using a font to print a magazine. Extracting a font and/or redistributing it is not fair use, of course.
Adobe gets burned by the DMCA Posted Sep 4, 2002 21:48 UTC (Wed) by cpm (guest, #3554) [Link] Not a real big fan of Adobe. However, building fonts, likeso many other things that folks take for granted, is a great deal of work. Folks that create the fonts deserve proper credit and compensation. However, like any other work of art, (that is what I feel a font is) the copyright should have a defined life, and should eventually revert to the public domain. And the license should benefit the creator more than the likes of companies like Adobe. I really hope they get a taste of their own medicine
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