[OpenFontLibrary] extraction issues

[Nicolas Spalinger]

Liam R E Quin wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 17:17 +0400, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
> 
>> Extracting fonts from PDF and saving in editable form is not rocket
>> science. You just grab Fontmatrix/SVN :)
> 
> That would be a really really really bad feature to put into
> fontmatrix, I'd say!
> 
> Let's at least try to keep at least a little good will with
> the commercial font designer community, if we actually
> want to see professional font designers start to get
> involved with open source.
> 
> Liam

I agree, attempting extraction for that purpose is really abusing the
author's willingness to put out a PDF specimen for review/critique
regardless of the chosen licensing.

Dave and Ben can probably tell you how type design students and
professionals from Reading or KABK react to that... :-(

Please let's not do that and be perceived as thieves (harsh words I know
but there you go). Being technically feasible is different than being
good for the community in this particular scenario. It really sends the
wrong message.

If we want people to respect our licenses, let us respect theirs too as
restrictive as they may be. A PDF specimen isn't a font source release.
Of course someone is going to make the theoretical well-meaning argument
of "at least one legal use is fine so we can do anything we want". IMHO
this isn't reverse engineering for interoperability but plain illegal
re-use of other people's work they didn't intend to share. Please
understand that we're not trying to get as many designers as possible to
hate us, that's not the goal.

DRE: digital rights expression are just that: expressing the intent of
the author. It it's ignored and trampled by users and peers how do you
think authors are going to react?

IHMO it's fairly simple: don't share something that the author hasn't
shared and doesn't want to share.

Don't know about you, but personally I prefer a reputation of giving and
donating (share and share-alike) to that of being an extractor of other
people's work that they didn't mean to share.



The updated OFL FAQ has:

Question: 1.13  If OFL fonts are extracted from a document in which they
are embedded (such as a PDF file), what can be done with them? Is this a
risk to Author(s)?

Answer: The few utilities that can extract fonts embedded in a PDF will
only output limited amounts of outlines - not a complete font. To create
a working font from this method is much more difficult than finding the
source of the original OFL font. So there is little chance that an OFL
font would be extracted and redistributed inappropriately through this
method. Even so, copyright laws address any misrepresentation of
authorship. All Font Software released under the OFL and marked as such
by the Author(s) is intended to remain under this license regardless of
the distribution method, and cannot be redistributed under any other
license. We strongly discourage any font extraction - we recommend
directly using the font sources instead - but if you extract font
outlines from a document please be considerate, use your common sense
and respect the work of the Author(s) and the licensing model.


I'm firmly opposed to the OFLB carrying any derivative fonts from such
dubious extraction origin! I really don't want this behaviour associated
with our community.

I'm interested in what the others here think, and not just the vocal few.


Cheers,

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




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