[OpenFontLibrary] use of (c) typefaces

[Nicolas Spalinger]

Dave Crossland wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I brought this up in my talk at lgm2009, should be online at
> river-valley.tv <http://river-valley.tv> soon, and one of the attendees
> suggested we ask foundries to have whoever looks out on the web for
> their stuff being redistributed without authorisation to keep an eye on
> our 'new uploads' rss feed. They have access to their fonts, they have
> wtf and so on, they have access to our fonts, and they have an interest
> in us not sharing their stuff unintentionally.

I think our moderation approach should tackle the issue from 3 different
angles:

- enforcing a review queue for all uploads to catch unintended mistakes
(pre-moderation)
- providing a feed to foundries for them to do the checking
(post-moderation)
- building a community-maintained db of metadata including fingerprints
of restricted fonts (centralized matching resources)

Stani Michiels of SPE and Phatch fame came up with a POC python script
to create a obfuscated visual fingerprint of a font with its own shapes
to allow comparison and matching.
I'm thinking that we could distribute such a script and that legitimate
owners of restricted fonts could contribute fingerprints to a common
database (a bit like the user-maintained community db MusicBrainz).
The script could run from fontmatrix's python console for example.

BTW the title of this thread is a bit misleading: the libre/open fonts
also rely on the author's (c) copyright and chosen free software
licensing to remain distributable and modifiable.


Cheers,

-- 
Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer
Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary
http://planet.open-fonts.org


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 260 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/openfontlibrary/attachments/20090511/e32d6547/attachment.pgp