I have already been using commercial fonts on the Web for over 10 years. They are all licensed, and very carefully, because they become part of the work I make.

The fact that I can now link to the font instead of burning it into an image with Photoshop HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE LICENSING. The fact that I can now link to the font instead of capturing its vectors as a Flash class HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE LICENSING. I have 10 years of documents, and each one has a little font list associated with it. Those documents will continue to have that font list attached to them for the rest of time. I don’t care if we have quantum computers and microwave Internet directly into our brains 20 years from now, the document I made back in 2005 will still have the same font list I chose for it in 2005.

I bought and paid for the rights to use all of the fonts in my personal collection in all of my creative projects. When I sit down to make a new document, I can choose from any of the fonts in my legally licensed collection — bought and paid for — that is the whole point of having a font collection.

The fact that we have MISSED OUT ON 10 YEARS OF FONT LINKING AT LEAST ALREADY because of the whining out of the foundries the last time we tried this in 1998 or so (both Netscape 4 and IE 4 can embed a font, but neither used the same font format and neither used TrueType) and have spent POTENTIALLY BILLIONS OF DOLLARS WORTH OF GRAPHIC DESIGNER AND PRODUCTION ARTISTS HOURS burning fonts into images all this time, and the fact that people have been looking at Verdana and Arial and Geneva in BILLIONS OF DOCUMENTS for the last decade means that we have already messed up really badly and THERE IS NO TIME TO WASTE TO RESTORE TYPOGRAPHY TO THE WEB.

So I second the notion of “fuck the foundries”, and I think the sentiment and the cursing is completely appropriate. The number of fonts I license has gone down steadily over the past 10 years along with the amount of money I put into font foundries. Now, I’m ready to add many new fonts to my collection because I’m working in HTML 5 and Flash 9 and they both have fonts, so I’m ready for a renaissance. To hear typographers COMPLAIN in the face of people WANTING TO START USING THEIR WORK MORE BROADLY AGAIN is just too much. Foundries have acted like spoiled brats for over a decade while for example, CD turned to MP3, which turned to MP4 with DRM, and then to MP4 without DRM. In music, we’re going to lossless within a few years. Where are the foundries?

Sheer stupidity, all of this. Asking me to pay again for my fonts after SUFFERING THROUGH THIS PAST LOST DECADE OF TYP0GRAPHY ON THE WEB is just too much. Typographers need to STFU and MAKE FONTS! They should be complaining to Microsoft that their text rendering is not professional standard, not complaining to creative people that the world can’t be turned back on its axis by 20 years.

“…the commercial font vendors believe the new file format is needed, but are unable to develop it with the available time and money.”

I don’t buy it. If foundries/designers don’t move soon, then they’re going to basically lose online control of all fonts for the foreseeable future, which will decimate their businesses. If they pay the up-front costs now, they will instantly create a new, growing, sustainable revenue stream.

The only way for this to become a win-win situation is for font foundries/designers to invest the up-front cost to save their own business. Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, Apple, graphic designers, and consumers are not going to invest to save the foundry companies, that’s completely ridiculous.

BUT YOU CAN STILL PUT THE PHOTOS ON YOUR WEBSITE THE WAY YOU WANT TO.

If someone steals the photo from your site, they’re guilty, not you.

I don’t understand why foundries think they’re so different or special. Copyrights are hard to apply, stop crying, deal with it and let us do what we want WITH FONTS WE FRICKING BUY !!!

As for sIFR or any other method, I won’t use that because it requires multiple technologies that might fail. As it stands I use Cufón because it allows me to use any font I want on any of the major browsers. But you know what? No commercial fonts. Fine.

And this whole typographers’ position that free fonts can’t be good fonts is not always true. Also, contrary to what they’d like us to believe, I do not need 50 different faces. Four is usually sufficient: Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic. Considering I usually have two different fonts in my designs that is quite sufficient.

I think the type foundaries are going to be missing out. They’re another industry that’s refusing to keep up with the way their industry is going. Look what happened to the music industry when they tried to stop digital downloads. Not only did they fail but they ended up losing epic amounts of money in the process. Now that they’re playing the game they’re making it back.

Agree, but what if you could place fonts on your personal domain, then link other sites back to your domain? Combined with Access-Control-Allow-Origin (on your domain, a.k.a. “font server”), you can have a font licensed to you once, and still have it on all of your sites.

The only problem left in this case if the font itself would allow that. If there’s some format which can embed license information of this. I personally don’t care if it’s a new version of TTF/OTF, EOT, or a new format… I just want to use a damn font legally, in a cross user-agent (read: print AND browser) fashion, and have it as a real text (resizable, selectable and all).

BTW, for what it’s worth – I hope we get SVG support in IE soon, along with support for SVG fonts (including the ability to embed SVG fonts in (X)HTML with CSS). Since SVG is “open source” to begin with, no licensing issues can really be imposed with it – if the font is created in this format, the font author implicitly accepts that the font is “free”.

Perhaps there is a technolgy so that designers can buy a licence, registered with a domain name.

So I would have to buy a license per domain? Unfair and expensive.

The idea is that a site actually calls a font sever so that fonts are served live. Only registered domains can pull those fonts.

Then prevent these fonts from being cached- like some images cannot be opened in a new window.

Does that make sense?

I was meaning not installing it on your computer in your fonts directory, but just holding it for that session. That would get around copyright licenses.