Quote:
Originally Posted by frabjous
I was going by the wording of what pdurrant posted. I didn't look at the details their website, but I cannot imagine that any legal action filed against someone who distributed one of their files inside an ePub, citing that langauge, whether encrypted or not, for the purpose of its being displayed in that book, could possibly hold any water at all unless they reworded what they wrote, or explicitly asked the person not to do so. If someone did extract it from the ePub and use it in an unintended way, when the license is right there for them to see, that would be an act of wrongdoing on that person's part, not on the ePub maker.
Of course, if they clarify their language, things can change.
That's my interpretation. I'm no legal expert, but if any legal system in which this is not true is not a legal system that has any rhyme or reason to it whatever. I realize that people who do give legal counsel have to err far on the side of caution, but there's also such a thing as standards of reasonableness. With that language, it strongly suggests font embedding is allowed, and no provision is made for how it is embedded.
Still, I'm not saying I would do it personally; probably only I would if encrypted. It's good that pdurrant is asking. Hopefully they'll clarify it.
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Font embedding in a technology context is widely understood to be a procedure that makes it difficult or impossible to recreate the source .ttf / .otf / .pbf file of the font.
I'm guessing even if you have a font 100% embedded into a PDF document, what is 100% embedded are the glyph shapes, but not necessarily 100% of the kerning, glyph combination logic, et cetera.
In my mind simply putting a font inside the ePub's zip container is
unambiguously distribution instead and not embedding. The arguably "embedding" method, while on the surface better fitting the definition I stated, is apparently an utterly minimal obfuscation that (with the right program) would be trivial to undo and thereby gain the original .ttf / .otf / .pbf file.
And while you might argue that "hackability" should not be a consideration for whether or not something is properly embedding... I don't believe there exists or could exist any software tools that take a 100% embedded font from a PDF document and produce therefrom a font file that is byte-by-byte equivalent to the original. That, however, is I believe is still eminently possible with ePub's "encrypted" embedding.
Let anyone liberally correct me on anything I am mistaken about.
- Ahi
P.s.: While I am not able to readily point to a definition... the notion that fonts have different licenses for embedding and redistribution itself makes it pretty clear that they view embedding as being functionally fundamentally different from distribution. And in my opinion, any process that allows somebody to get a CRC-correct copy of the font you embedded is definitely distribution... however unintentional it may be.