Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 12:24:51AM -0300, Felipe Sanches wrote:
I think that an SVG font to TTF converter could comply with this part of the specification, provided it refused to work on SVG fonts derived from copyrighted fonts.
that's the issue: refusing to work.
I think that the user should be responsible for his acts and for eventual copyright infringement.
IANAL, but...
Is the act above even considered infringement? I don't think so, at least not under US law. Since the graphical appearance of fonts is considered to fall below the threshold of creativity required for copyright, you are not infringing if the appearance is all that you copy.
It is only the procedural hinting code in TrueType fonts that makes them copyrightable -- if that is stripped by rendering the font into a new representation, then no infringement occurs. If you then add NEW hinting to the result, that hinting is copyright by you, and again, no infringement occurs (IOW, you've "reverse engineered" the font, which is legal).
I don't think it matters whether the font is rendered to pixels or bezier curves in an SVG document.
Are there legal cases which challenge this interpretation?
I admit it's a borderline case, but (even if you do believe in artificially imposed restrictions) you certainly shouldn't be implementing code to enforce a restriction which only *might* be illegal.
Cheers, Terry