Of all the copyright-holding businesses affected by the Internet, it seems to me the foundries are among the coolest. Their work is rampantly pirated. Only a tiny fraction of the people using SIFR and image replacement have actually licensed their type for embedding on the web. They could be hassling hundreds of sites over this, and they'd be well within their rights to do so.
What I get off this comment is that you think it's "obsolete" to suggest people should pay for typefaces. But typefaces, even moreso than music and movies, take years and years of painstaking work to create, and the truly useful faces are created by a tiny group of people who've dedicated their lives to the craft.
> What I get off this comment is that you think it's "obsolete" to suggest people should pay for typefaces.
Then, respectfully, you should reread it and then reply to what I actually wrote.
The point is not that I think fonts should be free. I have personally paid the equivalent of hundreds of dollars for pro-grade fonts, because I like my work to look good.
The point is that it's unrealistic for the foundries to expect that instead of paying for a font and then being able to use it, as we've managed in the civilised world for decades, we will now all move to a fonts-as-a-service model, where we will pay ongoing fees for DRM-crippled products served via third party systems out of our control.
There simply isn't any upside to that for the consumer, other than perhaps cheaper experiments with different fonts, which is of very limited value anyway if you're working with a professional agency with access to a large collection of fonts. The downsides, on the other hand, are potentially severe.
Image replacement is a huge pain in the ass. SIFR will get less compatible as time goes on, not more (already, I lose SIFR fonts because of ClickToFlash, and multiple bigcorps are moving to ban flash on corp desktops).
Convenience would be paying for a font and then using it on my web site, just the way I do with photos, icons, and other such resources.
Convenience is not jumping through hoops to integrate with an external service of unknown reliability, understanding non-trivial legal agreements with an industry infamous for trying to screw its legitimate customers, and paying more in a single year for font-as-a-service than I pay for permanent use of a font today just so I can legally use the font on a web site in plain text form instead of via images.
Incidentally, I notice that have mentioned elsewhere in this discussion that image replacement technologies are likely to violate the licensing terms of fonts. As far as I'm aware, there haven't been any significant test cases yet in this area in any major western jurisdictions, and the legalities are far from clear, because the font foundries can only protect their rights up to the extent that copyright law grants them. Copyright law incorporates concepts such as fair use (or your local equivalent). Moreover, in some jurisdictions, the design of a font is not subject to copyright at all, only the specific description (the font files being treated as software for this purpose). Even if the font foundries would like to limit your right to buy a font, put it on a server, and have the server generate renderings of specific text in that font, it's not entirely clear what their legal basis for doing so might be in unfavourable jurisdictions, including the US.
It may not be the case that the industry as a whole is locking out Flash on their corp desktops, but it definitely is the case that there are security-conscious F-500's who're getting Flash out of their standard desktop build, so that their internal machines can't be infected simply by browsing the web.
I can't give examples, for obvious reasons, but you can probably take my word for this.
What I get off this comment is that you think it's "obsolete" to suggest people should pay for typefaces. But typefaces, even moreso than music and movies, take years and years of painstaking work to create, and the truly useful faces are created by a tiny group of people who've dedicated their lives to the craft.
Why do you oppose paying them?