How Intellectual Protectionism fosters innovation
from Rad Geek @ Rad Geek People's Daily 12 Apr 2008 8:28 pm
… by legally prohibiting web designers from taking advantage of elegant standards-based methods for using their favorite fonts in web pages, unless the owner
of the font has specifically written them a permission slip for that. Note that if I prepared a copy of the same document using desktop publishing software, and printed 1,000,000 paper copies to distribute by snail mail to Internet users, I would not be breaking any legally-imposed monopolistic restrictions on web embedding
. If I then took one of those paper copies, scanned it as a PNG image, and then distributed that image through my website, I would not be breaking any legally-imposed monopolistic restrictions on web embedding,
either. If, on the other hand, I try to do the right thing and make my content available to users in a standard hypermedia format that can be properly indexed, searched, reformatted for accessibility, etc., I would be putting myself at risk of a lawsuit. In other words, your web design can be either ugly, broken, or illegal. Pick one.
Thanks, Intellectual Protectionism!
(Link via John Gruber.)