thought polution
July 19th, 2009
Johno Boardley: “Foundries do not want their raw (.ttf and .otf) fonts uploaded to Web sites where they can easily be downloaded (stolen).”
Downloading is not stealing. Stealing is when you take something without permission, and the original owner no longer has it.
updated: in the comments, shaver points out that millions of people have “stolen” Firefox. I discussed only unauthorized downloading.
July 19th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Related: software developers do not want their software downloaded (stolen) — oh, except when they _do_, because they want to get it to people.
Some downloading is stealing, just like walking out of a store with an item is sometimes stealing. We should punish stealing, not downloading or walking out of stores.
July 19th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
You *might* want to rename this post to “Low redefinition”.
July 19th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
ok…copied, redistributed, used without permission, used without payment…there’s still wrongdoing, despite the different semantics
July 19th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
I create something. I have the ability to sell it.
You create copies of that thing, and given them away, you have stolen that ability from me to a large extent.
July 19th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Sure, don’t steal things. Don’t download things you don’t have rights to (like stock photography, or other images; like videos; like songs). But don’t say “oh, we can’t permit these files to be used easily, because then people might save them, when they only have permission to _look_ at them”.
The idea that some trivial wrapping like EOT will prevent people who want to use fonts without authorization from doing so seems pretty naive to me. (It’s a trivial bookmarklet to let you replace the content of any page with something you edit, and then you could just save a screenshot of the result — WITH THE SECRET FONT MAGIC! — and print that. Legal?)
In unrelated news: I just took a screenshot of this thread, and stole your soul.
July 19th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
rsayre — you said:
“Downloading is not stealing. Stealing is when you take something without permission, and the original owner no longer has it.”
I agree with your distinction in the first half of the second sentence, but you go waaay too far with the second half.
Stealing is taking something you don’t have permission to take, irrespective of whether or not you took something tangible, like a diamond, or information, such as the words of another author or a stream of bits.
Yes, there are fair use issues that address exceptions, but that doesn’t seem to be the point you are making. It seems you are asserting you can make a copy of anything you want so long as the owner of the thing you copied from still has his source material.
If so, there is ample legal precedent saying you are wrong, precedent set well before “downloading” was a word.
Or are you making a different distinction — that “stealing” is to be reserved only for tangible things, and unauthorized copying of information is just as bad morally and legally but there is a different word for it. If so, I’d like to learn that word.
July 19th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
Jim B: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft
My point is that the words “taking” and “copying” have different definitions.
July 19th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
rsayer –
I followed the link, and it doesn’t seem to support your argument. Theft is defined as taking someone else’s property without their consent. The word “property” is linked in that definition which states the property can be either physical or virtual.
“Stealing is when you take something without permission, and the original owner no longer has it.” is narrower than the definition of theft you supplied.
I agree that taking and copying are two different things, but in the legal matter of ownership, it really doesn’t matter. If you write a song and copyright it, others can’t print the sheet music for it without your consent, nor can they even perform it. The fact that many people do anyway doesn’t trump the legal and moral issues at hand.
July 19th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
“Bootlegging” has been proposed as an alternative word for unauthorized software downloading, since it’s very different from stealing a physical object.
July 20th, 2009 at 1:51 am
If I break into a web server and download some private data, I have stolen it. So you can apply the concept of theft to the mere duplication of data in some circumstances.
Copyright infringement isn’t theft, breaking copy protection schemes isn’t theft. Figuratively we could refer to these things as such but rationally and legally they are not!
July 20th, 2009 at 7:21 am
Alexander Limi –
“bootlegging” as applied to copying music or warez is a comfort word that is used to make the thief feel better about themselves.
A common defense is: what’s the harm? I wouldn’t have bought it anyway if I hadn’t copied it.
Here is an analogy that perhaps demonstrates the problem. Say you went out of town for a week, and I happened to know it. In that time I move into your house and use it, and I am careful to make the beds and wash the towels and hang them up before I leave such that you wouldn’t know I was there. “Hey, he wasn’t using it anyway.” Are you OK with that?
The post was originally about downloadable fonts. I’m all for this new capability and the improvement it will make to online typography. Nevertheless, just because we want all fonts to be free doesn’t mean that we can force them to be free. The creator has to release the rights.
Just because the security mechanism it trivial to defeat doesn’t mean the rules don’t apply. To make another analogy, we’d all agree that a bank heist where the thieves have to tunnel into the vault is clearly illegal. Walking into a child’s bedroom and taking the money from their piggy bank because the security offered by the cork in the bottom is trivial to circumvent doesn’t make it any less a theft.
July 20th, 2009 at 11:21 am
I’m going to quote Mark Pilgrim on this one: “Fuck the foundries”.
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/04/21/fuck-the-foundries
July 20th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
As Rob implies in his subsequent post, the “foundries” are still in trouble, even in their fantasy-land scenario in which every browser immediately transfers a dollar to their account every time a page using “their” font is displayed. In that system, authors and readers will soon start using free fonts, and free fonts will soon go from good enough to better than anything you can pay for. This has already happened to the vast majority of actual content. It would surpass sense to imagine that this wouldn’t happen for fonts as well, if anyone actually paid that much attention to fonts in the first place.
July 22nd, 2009 at 5:29 am
Expectations are more important than laws and definitional disputes. The problem for the foundries is that they got into their business expecting the world was a certain way (fonts not easily shared). They weren’t expecting web browsers to change all that.
That’s unfortunate, but making the world better for foundries *today* means making the world worse for everyone else. That would be more unfortunate.