Quote:
Originally Posted by theducks
Really?
Take a Hubcap or the whole car. Do the cops care?
But Yer Honor, It was only a "Y and Z"
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It actually
does matter, Ducks. In the
Adobe Systems v. Southern Software Systems, Inc. case, the court ruled that fonts are software (not creative Intellectual Property, which is why traditional copyright doesn't apply), and that by copying an entire font file--the
ENTIRE file--the software was effectively stolen.
Subsetting works
around that. I mean...logically, what's the objection to "redistribution" or "embedding"? It's that the end-user, the buyer of the book, could
extract the file and then
own the font and
be able to use it. Nobody cares if you have a Desktop Publishing license and put 300 of 301 characters of a font on a book cover, or in a printed book interior. That's because they can't extract the font from the printed copy or the cover image.
Similarly, if you subset a font, the end-user can extract the file all he wants--but the font isn't usable, because he doesn't get all the characters. Let's say you use a font for drop caps. You use, say, 18 letters, all upper-case. That's a far cry from the
entire font file.
So, in
every sense, font embedding legally prevents the font from being "redistributed" as a font. The entire "software program" (font) doesn't work, because some of it is missing.
I mean--think of it this way. If you took images of the upper-case letters and slapped them in as drop caps, like boxed letters, would that be embedding? Nope, just as it's not embedding to use the font's picture on a cover or anyplace else.
Font redistribution
licensing (the existence thereof) deals with and addresses the possible repercussions of the (entire) font (file) being extracted from the (end) file and being
stolen and reused by
someone who hasn't licensed it. Font embedding precludes that.
I don't believe--but don't factually know--that there's ever been a legal case about whether or not subsetting meets the
intent of the Adobe v. SS case, but I suspect that a foundry would have a very hard time making the case that a subset font was font embedding under the legal definition thereof.
Hitch