Suppose a foundry marks each copy of the fonts it ships to clients with some unique key buried somewhere in the metadata, such that if an illegal copy is found, it's possible to trace its source.
Have you ever heard of something like this?
Do you think this would be a good idea?
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I guess you're thinking more about OTFs though right?
This is an interesting story, and a bizarre one.
By the way, if I'm ever going to do that (which I'm not), I think I won't use some metadata field, but some glyph. It's more cool
That's been done too. Why waste your time when it could be more productively spent? Trying to catch a pirate, unless you have a large quantity of fonts at risk, is not time well spent.
The point of serialising fonts with licensee data isn't to trace the source of pirated versions but to be able to clearly identify unlicensed use. In this respect, serialising fonts is no different from serialising other forms of software.
One cannot practically do that with a font. With fonts it is more like trying to find who removed the proverbial needle in the haystack after it has been found and moved elsewhere. Unless a license holder admits to releasing a font in the wild, it would be incredibly difficult (impossible) to identify the perpetrator. Without knowing who actually did the deed, one cannot really do much about it. Even if one knows, there is little to be done.
I'm a pessimist when it comes to this issue. It's going to happen and there is nothing preventative I can do about it and can only hope some sites would honor a take down notice. This subject has paralyzed me in fact. I'm sitting on the first commercial fonts I have made since the 1980s/1990s. If and when I do release them, I don't want them out and about illegally for at least a couple weeks...
Sorry for the pessimistic first post.
Mike
And I will release them. I haven't decided the who to sell through nor even pricing yet. And then there is that hesitation to overcome. But I will. Probably. Maybe...else I'll keep using them for layout work.
Again, and as I said, serialisation is not about identifying a 'perpetrator' responsible for distributing a font illegally. It is about being able to say to someone using the font 'Excuse me, but this font is not licensed to you. Please pay for a license.'
But how are you even going to know the font is being used in the wild and who is using it?
We've found it useful for checking to see if a website is using a properly licensed font, or for diagnosing font problems (i.e. customer made some dumb modification and now the kerning is gone).
We don't tag our desktop fonts, but I wish we did. I can think of several times where being able to verify the legitimacy of a license, or even knowing an approximate date when the font was issued, would have been very helpful.
Slightly off topic: I LOVE that FontForge and Font Squirrel include breadcrumbs in the fonts they produce. Being able to crack a font and see that it's been modified is super helpful for tech support.
And I'm not sure I understand what checksum has to do with marking copies: Unless you're serializing copies using some unique tag, all copies will have the same checksum, and if you do have a unique tag, you don't need the checksum. Checksum can help you detect if a copy has been modified, but then again, if it has, you don't need checksum to be able to tell that, you can simply use diff or so. What am I missing?
Applied to fonts, you could put in a @yanone logo with a rough outline, and the point positions would differ slightly in each sold font. Only you would know the original outline and be able to extract the information encoded in the point coordinate differences.
If I ever care to inspect some free font version roaming around out there and find these extra points, then I’ll know that it originated from that classroom.
a) I’ll probably never bother to do that, and b) there won’t really be any practical recourse. But at least I’ll know where it came from.
And I suppose I would then be able tell that instructor that his best efforts to impress upon his students the value of fonts and educate them against sharing will have failed.
One of the major foundries used to put a license number in the metadata of every font they sold online, at time of purchase. (Not sure if they still do or not.)
James, you might want to look at IPFS, which solves the problem of centralized server downtime (Typekit) since the font files are distributed to the point that they are served at a city level.
A blockchain, being an immutable record solves licensing issues. What license does your customer have? Who knows, but with a blockchain you can instantly verify the rights that were purchased, regardless of the distributor. Server, desktop, web, etc.
Cryptocurrenty will allow us to presell fractional rights of typefaces, have smart contracts instantly perform royalty splits, or crowdfund exotic typefaces with limited market appeal - these are just the easy ones.
We have a problem with centralization and typefaces. Those databases and servers can and do go down. As far as the business aspect, Monotype anyone? Breaking that monopoly will require a 10x solution, and cryptocurrency is the best option on the horizon.