Re: [dvd-discuss] How many bits is a technical protection measure?

["Michael A Rolenz" <Michael.A.Rolenz(at)aero.org>]

Chance favors the prepared mind....

Lets see if I understand his website....
he likes to design fonts (so does my Mother...she's a commercial artist).
He puts his fonts on the web for free (free....how can ANYbody be that 
UnAmerican and not salivate at untold wealth they are giving away)
He made a tool that allows the fonts to have no restrictions which might 
impede the use of his fonts.
I'd say that tool is merely allowing fair use

As for effective....the only way this is effective is if you get to outlaw 
the TrueType specification and a hex editor....or censoring the 
instructions "open file into your favorite hex editor. Go to address XX. 
Change contents to "OO" and exit".

The whole notion of protecting fonts digitally is totally stupid. I 
haven't tried to do it recently but in previous versions of Mathematica 
(4.0) and Adobe (4.0) I couldn't paste graphs as metafiles only bitmaps. 
Why? Wolfram research copyrighted the fonts. Adobe decided to protect the 
interests of font designers from possible copyright infringement by not 
creating intermediate PS unless the font was not copyrighted. I got fed up 
with BOTH companies. Adobe's reaction was 'but we are saving their 
intellectual property from someone who might take the intermediate PS and 
extract the fonts from it [even though you couldn't do this from the 
PDF]". Wolframs response was "yes we copyrighted to protect our 
intellectual property but we expect you to be able to USE the fonts...we 
can't help you...it's Adobe's problem"

Raises an interesting question....the fonts are copyrightable but the 
purpose of having fonts is to communicate. If I can't use them to 
communicate consistently and am subject to arbitrary conditions that 
cannot be negociated and not even disclosed when purchased (e.g., the 
garbage adobe produces when it substitutes mathematica fonts) THEN there 
is a failure of the implied warrenty of merchantablitliy. 




Scott A Crosby <crosby@qwes.math.cmu.edu>
Sent by: owner-dvd-discuss@eon.law.harvard.edu
04/23/02 07:44 AM
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        Subject:        [dvd-discuss] How many bits is a technical protection measure?


Remember we were having discussions as to whether or not a single bit flag
was an 'effective technical protection measure'.. Well, it seems that at
least one organization believes that two bytes is a protection measure.

True Type Fonts have a couple of flags that indicate in what and how they
may be embedded into a document. Most programs for editing them set those
flags to 'not embeddable'.

So, a lounge-rat here wrote a program that would reset those flags to
allow him to mark his fonts as embeddable.. He has recieved a DMCA
takedown letter (which is on its way to ChillingEffects.org) from a font
house ordering him to remove the program.

Yes, the program does nothing other than parse the TTF header, overwrite
two bytes with 0's, and calculate a new checksum.

        http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~twm/embed/

If the program *is* found to be a violation of the DMCA.. Would that imply
that the Microsoft TTF specification is also a violation? Or would it
imply that a set of instructions for how to change those two bytes (using
a hex-editor) is a violation? Or is a hex-editor itself a violation?

Scott