Right now there is talk about how people are now going to distribute fonts online. Since designing a typeface is really challenging,typographers really want to protect their fonts from piracy.
With CSS3 coming along, developers are now given the chance to use their own fonts simply by referring to them in a CSS file. While nice, it exposes the font to piracy. Typography sells font to customer, customer uses font on website, people who visit the website could download the font, in other words, steal.
The simple solution they took is very similar to what the music industry does. Using DRM they make difficulties for the person viewing the page by making it complicated and difficult to download, thus preventing privacy. The site I Love Typography mentions three types: Flash, Javascript+VML, and JQuery. The problem is, the solutions are really ugly. Back in the 1990s we used to have EOT, Embedded OpenType, which was suported by MS and heavily used DRM to protect and only worked in IE. Oh the pain.
Now people at the TypeCon 2009 have suggested a new idea called .webfont . You can see the proposal for W3C here. The idea is to have two documents, one .xml and the other .webfont . The XML would specify which sites it should be permitted on, so it cant be stolen. The webfont is a file which acts I guess like a font file like OTF (the font-type may be specified in the XML).
The stupid thing is that this needs to be implemeted into the browser itself for it to work. Since this is the internet, the protocol is HTTP. This makes it almost impossible for someone not have the capability of downloading a file, bypassing the XML restriction that would be caused by the browser. What if I want to develop my own browser? I could easily bypass this and steal a font. The .webfont idea in my opinion does not solve anything. Even the proposal says so (though not in the same reason I gave).
Then again, I have no idea how the entire thing would work anyway. Practically anything stored on the internet is prone to being stolen.
