Slashdot Mirror
Adobe Gets Hit By DMCA
Reeses writes "Adobe has asked a U.S. District court to allow them to embed ITC and Monotpye fonts in their documents, claiming "Adobe has asked the court to declare that Adobe's popular Acrobat product does not violate certain provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as claimed by ITC and Agfa Monotype." Which is interesting after the Skylarov/Elcomsoft debacle from a year or so ago. I guess they figured that it didn't apply to them since they enforced it."
A nice analysis of this can be found here
The complaint could be related to how Acrobat handles the embedding bits in truetype fonts.
According to Adobe they have secured the rights for their customers to embed fonts from certain companies. Now what if the customer has a copy of the font which has the "do not embed under any circumstances" bits set? Simple, Acrobat can ignore the bits and embed the font anyway. Oops, that's circumventing a copy protection measure, instant DMCA violation.
If that's the case, Agfa has pressed this issue before: see Font Company Wielding DMCA Against Bit-Flipping
Of course, there's not enough info in the article to determine if this is the case or not...
So, the question is: did Adobe pay for the DMCA?
Doesn't matter. Adobe is a Patriotic Great American Corporation(tm), while the rest of us are just Evil Terrorist Content Pirates(tm).
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
the story I always heard was it was trivial for the software distributors to make one tiny change to one character and it was legally a new typeface (it wasn't bit for bit identical).
Actually, there's a big difference between a typeface - the set of curves that define the shape of a character - and a computer font - the code that draws those curves. The latter has full protection of law. You can't take the font and change a few bits in it and legally redistribute it, and those companies that did got sued big time. You can, however, print out the font at large sizes and scan it back into the computer, or anything else that copies the curves but not the program/font.
Although the law in theory applies to corporations as if they were people, in practice it doesn't because there are fewer sentencing options to use against corporations. A person can be sentenced to prison, or in more barborous socities like the USA, even killed.
Also a person who is simply accused of something can have their liberty curtailed whilst awaiting trial.
I want to see PERSONAL responsibility brought back into the justice system. If a high-level manager makes a decision that amounts to committing a crime, don't drag the company to court - drag HIM to court. If people knew that the things they do at work are things they will be held responsible for, they'd be a lot less willing to do things they know are wrong.
The concept of "limited liability" originally was intended to protect those who invested in the company. If it went bankrupt the share/stock certificates would be worthless, but there would be no requirment for those people to pay over any more money.
At some point this became twisted into protection for enguaging in stupid even criminal business practices. With stock market pricing having little relationship with actual profitability.