[OpenFontLibrary] Kernest’s Web Font Serving Engine – Fontue – Now Open Source

Nicolas Spalinger nicolas_spalinger at sil.org
Thu Apr 22 02:30:33 PDT 2010


On 04/22/2010 02:15 AM, Barry Schwartz wrote:
> Nicolas Spalinger <nicolas_spalinger at sil.org> skribis:
>> I like the way you're not hiding the origin, license and other metadata
>> of the libre/open fonts you include in your catalog  (Ahem unlike others
>> apparently: http://readableweb.com/typekit-and-copyright-fraud/ but they
>> promised they will work on clarifying it..)
> 
> More like blog fraud, if you ask me. :) But TypeKit did make the
> mistake of writing language that sounds "legal", rather than
> English. (The ISC license is the only I can think of that is written
> in English, and for that you have to disregard the disclaimer, which
> is written in Alpha Centauran.)

Ha ha ha :-D  I thought that the Alpha Centaurans would be using a more
complicated writing system... but they just go for CAPITAL LETTERS then?
Hey, that would explain the high quality of OpenBSD ;-D

Seriously, the general mistake is mislabeling and miscategorizing
creations that upstream authors have released under their chosen
licenses (whatever it may be) and sweeping that under a superset EULA.

All I'm saying is that these brokers shouldn't deliberately hide what
authors have chosen to do with their creation as they distribute or
provide subscriptions. It's rather disingenuous otherwise.

> TypeKit embeds my fonts, as a service to others; they should embed the
> copyright string with the font, but it doesn't really matter, because
> I do not require attribution when someone embeds my fonts. Some _do_
> require attribution for embedding (Jos Buivenga, for one), but I'm not
> sure it's TypeKit who needs to do the attributing; rather the website
> using the font.

IMHO it's great that typekit provides a service to others allowing them
easier access to your work. (BTW the link to your personal website and
other creations you have published is 404 on your typekit profile).

But people going through catalogs of such brokers will want to know the
details of what they are allowed to do before using/subscribing to the
given font.

> Personally, I think requiring attribution for the use of a text font
> is somewhat like requiring a painter to follow the signature with a
> note about what brand of paint, brushes, palettes, and easles were
> used.

Requiring (or not) attribution in the resulting artwork or document
(such as in a small colophon) is orthogonal to requiring the copyright
and licensing notice not be hidden, removed and overriden by a global
license...

In many licenses the former is optional (usually appreciated) but the
latter is mandatory.

My feeling is that in the knowledge society/economy you could argue that
hiding or stripping away authorship information is one of the worst
crimes whereas a mention in a colophon somewhere (or more generally some
kind of linkback) is appreciated by most authors.

Cheers,


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



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