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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."
Maybe with more large corps getting hit with DMCA violations, there will be stronger lobbying against it.
I for one like to see the DMCA used against companies that could possibly aid in its downfall.
We all know that laws like the DMCA are there to protect the big corporations who pay for the politicians to get those laws on the books. We can't have those same laws being used AGAINST these corporations now can we?
ain't it sweet?
It will show that poorly written laws with big teeth are dangerous to everyone, whether they are consumers, the non-consuming public, industry, or the politicians who support them.
Cross your fingers, maybe this is the beginning of the end for the DMCA.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
After the Sklyrov debace it is difficult to have any sympathy for Adobe.
... this is the kind of karmic returns such ill-considered, anti-social behavior in the name of padding stockholders pockets at the expense of the public good warrent, and perhaps now a little more often will actually receive.
Free Market ueber Alles types should take note
There is a social and ethical context to everything we do, as individuals, as members of corporations, or as corporations themselves. This is but one small aspect of it, and while it is far too seldom to see payback of this sort for wrongdoing within the span of a human life, it is most gratifying one rare occasions like this when poetic justice actually does occur.
Maybe next time Adobe will reconsider, and perhaps even lobby against such draconian and despicable legislation, rather than amorally adding it to their lawyers' arsenal.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
A nice analysis of this can be found here
They're getting hit by the DMCA
They're getting hit by the DMCA
They went and messed up
and embedded the font
now they're getting it in the [censored]
They're getting hit by the DMCA
They're getting hit by the DMCA
</YMCA Tune>
Arent these the same companies going after the CMU student for his embed tool?
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
first reaction: [in wise-man voice] what goes around comes around... yeah...
second reaction: so THAT's what a critical mass of dumbasses can do...
and then it dawned on me: so the legends of "lawyers with head in ass" is really true after all...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Remember that Adobe is not fighting the DMCA. They are merely trying to bribe^h^h^h^h^hconvince a judge into saying that their actions are not a violation of the DMCA as has been alleged by other companies. This can have a couple possible outcomes. (IANALBTW)
1. Adobe is sucessful in getting a judge to declare they are not violating the DMCA. This has bad and good reprocussions. The DMCA is strengthened by case law, but what Adobe gets off for, everyone else does as well.
2. Adobe is not sucessful in getting a judge to decalre they are not violating the DMCA. This is initially bad, because the DMCA remains as strong as it was and the restrictions it imposes are stengthened by case law. In the long run, however, Adobe, one of the few non-Media oriented companies that has the most to gain from the DMCA is forced to lobby against it and fight it in court, possibly having longer lasting influence.
The lesson we should learn from all this is that if a law requires a trial just to see if it applies to any certain case, it's probably not a good law and won't be applied fairly.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I have worked in the advertising industry for 7 years, designing advertisements and catalogs -- with purchased fonts -- and I never had this problem, nor have I heard of anyone in that industry having this problem.
Presumably any fonts that shipped with product you got from a software vendor would be (should be) properly registered and legal to use out of the box. Otherwise, the fonts need to be purchased. It should be OK to distribute graphics, artwork, etc. as long as you purchased the fonts. I don't see why documents in Adobe acrobat should be considered any different from artwork produced in any other digital format.
It's a common thing that when sending files to a service bureau for ripping, that you give the service bureau your fonts, or you make sure they are *embedded* in your postscript output. I have never heard that this is considered *copyright infringement*.
The only problem I can forsee is if you can extract the fonts from Acrobat and use them for something else. Then there is a legitimate complaint.
Otherwise, if Adobe can show that Acrobat is yet another format like GIF, JPEG, etc., and that if the person who creates a particular piece of artwork with legally purchased fonts does not violate copyright, then Adobe should win.
If there is a copyright issue, it should be with the person who created the artwork and who didn't use licensed fonts, not with the people who created the file format.
"Many years ago Adobe anticipated the shift to electronic documents. At that time, we obtained the embedding rights from our font partners necessary to permit the creation of electronic documents," said Jim Heeger, senior vice president, cross media products....
Adobe believes these claims are being made to gain ITC and Agfa leverage in the contractual disputes. Adobe strongly disputes this claim and is asking the court to rule that there is no violation of the DMCA.
What this says to me is that Adobe licensed the fonts, intending to distribute them in electronic documents, and ITC/Afga didn't foresee that, and now they want more money for it, threatening to use the DMCA where it doesn't apply.
The Slashdot headline was sensationalist and misleading. I can't see how ITC/Afga could argue that the DMCA should even apply here.
Ironically, the legalese file which states the terms is a pdf...for which they strongly suggest Adobe Acrobat.
Does this mean that we can get free fonts from PDF files?
To be fair about it, we should only grab fonts out of PDF files distributed by the copyright holders of the fonts in question. The most likely candidates for such use would be files from Microsoft and Apple.
And it's legal--they own the fonts, they gave them to us, and they didn't even have a click-through license on them.
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...
This case brings up an interesting proposition, and may hint at future threats to the DMCA. If a law is so draconian and restrictive, then eventually it can come around and bite the ass of the people originally supporting it. The same could be said for Bermans 'right to hack' bill, if it some how survives constitutional muster, then it could allow anyone (you and me) to hack the RIAA, MPAA back, looking for any copyrighted works we have created - art, digital home photos and movies, etc.
The first thing to do is copyright every digital work you have and then sue any company that modifies it without your permission - which apparently every software program out there will modify your creation on some level. I'm not a software engineer, so I don't know all the intricacies.
www.enthea.org
Just because you haven't heard of these companies doesn't mean that they're small. These are two big design groups, and a lot of the typefaces that you see every day in print, on billboards, on TV, and on your own monitor came out of them.
So would the Agfa and ITC employees. So would the designers who use these fonts every day. Everyone out there is trying to make a buck, but doing it by screwing over other people isn't the way it's supposed to be done. Granted, this is a messed up dog eat dog world, but that doesn't excuse laws like the DMCA which will harm us all in the long run. Just because someone like Skylarov didn't contribute to the annual GDP as much as the collective of Adobe doesn't mean that he should be valued any less. Remember, corporations are supposed to be counted as individuals legally, and thus they should have no more privledge and status than any other individual, no matter how much wealth they create.
And just remember that all companies that grew in to these wealth-creating machines had to start small. Two guys in a garage. A guy in a wharehouse. Two men and a woman with an idea. Everyone and everything has to start somewhere, but they never will get the chance to grow if they are squashed prematurely by the big guys. If you really want to see wealth, and if you really want to see growth then you've got to allow for enough freedom for people to do their work. The DMCA allows the big guys to deny that. If you're really for capitalism then you should be against the DMCA.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Wow, you're an amazing dullard.
God, your myopia makes a televangelist appear openminded.
Free Marken uber Alles? Hello, flyspeck, it's not the free market that passed the DMCA--it's a hyper-active government that did so.
hyper-active government? Elected government, acting upon the desires its constituency (not the voter, but rather the paying special interest/corporation), in a free market of influence and paid-for legislators, thanks to a 1978 supreme court ruling interpreting corporate finance as equivelent to free speech. If the governmenty is hyper-active, it is because the ever-worshipped 'invisible hand' of the free market of legislative influence has made it so.
Legislation has everything to do with markets, free or otherwise, indeed no market (free or otherwise) can exist in a complete vacuum of legislation and function coherently (if you really need it spelled out for you, consider any number of ungoverned lands as well as the behavior of the black market itself. Lack of regulation means lack of laws for a court to interpret, i.e. a lack of jurisprudence and the rule of the gun, libertarian myths of anarchistic utopia notwithstanding).
But of course, all of that misses the point I originally made entirely (which was, perhaps, your intent). By perusing any number of Ayndroidian posts here on slashdot and elsewhere from people who argue similarly to yourself, the common reply to complaints about corporate malfaescence and misbehavior, be it financial, social, economic, or environmental, is always a handwave toward the mythical 'invisible hand' of the marketplace (which has already been debunked by more recent, and more applicable, economic theory for which a Nobel prise has been granted) with no supporting argument as to how or why a free market would, for example, prevent Monsanto from poisoning the drinking water of a small southern US town than, say, government oversight that would throw such people in jail for doing such a thing.
As I said before, oh thought-challenged reactionary, everything we do is done in an ethical and social context, a fact which libertarian dogma and naive readers of Ayn Rand can't seem to grasp for all its obviousness to the rest of the human population. That goes for Adobe, and is irrevelent with respect to the specifics of the legislation in question, to wit:
Adobe took a social convention (in this case the poorly concieved DMCA, but it might just as well have been copyright law itself, or some other convention) and used it to the detriment of the the society as a whole. Now that another has turned and done a similar thing to them, they are without support. This means that mitigating cirumstances, that might normally have led to a compromise, are likely to fall on deaf ears and evince, at most, an amused chuckle from the common observer.
In other words, now that the tables are turned, the pathetic excuse of "their only responsibility is to their shareholders and it is proper that they do all that is legal, no matter how unethical or reprehensible, to make money" is shown to be the absurdity that most clear thinking people always recognized it to be, namely that, in the end, such behavior undermines not only the society, and hurts not only the victims of the initial misbehavior, but ultimately the very company and stockholders the behavior was purported to benefit.
Alas, the weakness of the free market for determining ethical behavior is that, as often as not, unethical behavior does pay, often with little or no unpleasant consiquence for the corporate wrongdoer. Which of course means if you want to build a society fit for humans to live in, rather than merely one that is designed to service corporate entities at the expense of everyone else, you need more than just a simple, unregulated, free market.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
If that is so, then we need a corporate death penalty. M$ needs to get the chair.
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.
> Wealth 'creation' isn't a dream, its taking the bread off
> someone else's table. This isn't some kind of self renewing
> table, that 'wealth' comes from somewhere.
You apparently have never had ecconomics, and are operating
under the assumption that there is a fixed amount of wealth,
so that if it is transfered from one entity to another then
that's that, and the rich can by selling a lot of stuff
accumulate all of the wealth and starve out the poor. This
is true of certain kinds of wealth (the most obvious example
being real estate), but it is not true in general and is
certainly not true of currency, at least not under our current
system. I'm going to appear to stray off topic here for a bit,
but I will get back to copyright law before I'm done.
If currency _did_ work that way, then we could increase the
total amount of wealth by just printing tons more money.
But in reality, that would just cause extra inflation. The
ecconomy is not measured in terms of how much currency
exists in the system, but more in terms of how many times
it is spent[1].
Every time a buck is spent, somebody gets something for it.
Let's say you go out and buy Photoshop. You fork over an
outrageous sum of money, and Adobe takes it -- but you get
a copy of Photoshop. Adobe now has your money, and they're
going to do _something_ with it. (Hopefully something other
than wallpaper the executive bathroom, because that would
remove the money from circulation.) Maybe they pay a font
designer for thirty minutes' worth of work. The font designer
now has the money -- but Adobe (hopefully, if everything is
working as it should) has something to show for it, maybe
a nice glyph or something. The font designer will take the
money and do something with it. Maybe he pays his phone bill,
for example. AT&T now has the money (your money, remember?),
but the font designer got to call his mom long distance.
Every time the money changes hands, somebody gets something.
(There are exceptions. For example, you don't get anything
when you spend money to pay your taxes. If the government
takes the tax money and throws it in a vault, they've reduced
your ability to spend money and are not spending it themselves
either, and the whole system becomes impoverished. OTOH, if
they tax you and then turn around and spend the money, then
it is back in circulation and can be spent again.)
Now, this doesn't mean you should necessarily spend your money
as fast as possible. If everyone did that it would boost the
whole ecconomy, and people would have more stuff; you would
have more stuff -- but it wouldn't necessarily be the stuff
you wanted to have. It generally works best if you spend the
money on something you actually want.
Savings are another topic for another day, but basically saving
only hurts the ecconomy if you stuff a billion dollars in a
matress. If you invest it (even in a savings account), it can
to a large extent continue changing hands while you're not using
it, and thus stay in circulation. That has value, which is why
you get to collect interest.
Now, back to copyrights. Copyrights are (in general) good,
because they cause more money to be spent more times. However,
current copyright law may perhaps go too far. Seventy years
after the death of the author, very few works are still in a
position to generate any substantial amount of spending. That
being the case, the duration of copyright is probably too long,
and should probably be shortened. Copyright holders who have
good sense often release their works after a few years (when
they stop generating any real revenue) in order to collect good
PR. (I don't mean they place them into the public domain --
although that is sometimes done too -- but that they start to
give out permissions more liberally than they would have in
the beginning. In software, this can mean taking a commercial
product (e.g., the Zork series) and making it available for
free public download (as Activision did).)
So, is the DMCA good, or bad? Well, waving it around like a
club the way certain entities have been doing of late is a big
pain for everyone concerned. It's annoying, and it accomplishes
very little in the long term. But that goes back to the very
litigation-friendly nature of our society and of our court
system, more than to any given law per se. I've seen several
people post with the opinion that the DMCA does not apply here
and is being misused. Perhaps so; IANAL. It has been misused
in several cases where it does not or should not apply, so that
would not really be a big change.
I still haven't answered the question of whether the DMCA is
good or bad... but I'm not going to do that in this post.
[1] We could quibble about the word "spent", but basically
I'm talking about forking over the money in exchange for
some desired good or service, rather than just giving it
over for nothing in return. Gifts don't harm the ecconomy
(since the givee can turn around and spend the money), but
they don't really contribute either. Taxes fall into the
same category; they are effectively contributions, albeit
mandatory ones, rather than spending in the sense I'm
talking about spending.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
What I'd like to see is that anarchistic utopia of free software developers squash software corporations like Adobe into the ground. There's only one way capitalists will learn and that's for them to watch the very markets that make them rich disappear from right under their nose. Not only software, but media, TV, music, etc. will all experience the effects of the mythical anarchistic utopia you've mentioned. Or maybe they won't... but it sure looks to me like free software is giving Microsoft a run for its money. Who do you think will be next?
... unless the cartel in question buys legislation from a corrupt government to kill individual innovation.
I like capitalism. I'm quite good at it (and make a very good living at it). Capitalism, in the form of competative free markets is generally good for dealing with most naturally scarce things (not all mind you, as sometimes other pressures can cause the free market to break down. Natural monopolies, such as the road to your home and your drinking water are one type of example. Medical services, where the pressure of having an alternative of dying if you chose not to be a customer, is arguably another area that lends itself only very imperfectly to a competative, free market.)
However, in the realm of ideas, invention, software, and infinitly copiable content, there is no natural scarcity, and capitalism breaks down. So much so that the government feels compelled to create monopolies, with no pretense of a competative, free market.
And you are right, a thriving, cooperative commons, with its own internal (mostly friendly, though sometimes not) competition will outcompete a monopoly cartel every time
Which is exactly what Microsoft is all about with Palladium, and the RIAA and the MPAA are all about with so-called DRM (digital rights revocation). They know they can't compete. Microsoft can't compete with free software and, in the long run, the recording industry and movie studios will not be able to compete with a vibrant community of artists creating free (or very inexpensive) music and movies (the latter quite possibly with blender, as I am doing). Online copyright violators and file sharers aren't any more of a threat than VHS and cassette tape users were fifteen years ago, and they know that. It isn't about preventing file sharing, its about preventing competition, something a corporation with a cartel mindset simply cannot abide.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
you don't get anything when you spend money to pay your taxes.
So having roads to travel on, schools for your children, and armed forces to defend your nation count as nothing?
Copyrights are (in general) good, because they cause more money to be spent more times.
You're saying copyright is good because it will cause people to spend money. That may make sense if people would not otherwise spend that money. In reality, if people could acquire copyrighted content for free, they would spend their money on something else. Furthermore, without copyright, anyone who wants the content could get it; whereas with copyright, only those willing to spend the demanded fee will obtain the content. Thus copyright holds back the distribution of wealth (content).
You argue that copyright is good because it encourages people to spend money. Your argument is flawed. Spending money is only good in that it can encourage the creation of wealth. When you buy a sandwich at McDonalds, you pay McDonalds to serve you a quick, convenient meal, so wealth has been created. McDonalds pays someone to process your order (which is really just overhead), someone to make your sandwich, and a farmer to grow the food. In each case (except for the overhead), McDonalds pays for the creation of wealth.
As another example, suppose I sell my car to a high school student. The student can't afford a new car, so she won't pay anyone to create a car for her. I can't afford a new car, so I won't pay anyone to create one. However, since I gave up my car in return for money, the student has acquired wealth, and I have enough money to buy a new car, thus creating wealth.
Copyright increases wealth only insomuch as it encourages the creation of wealth (content). Without copyright, artists would presumably not bother creating content and no one would get anything. If copyright lasts longer than is necessary, it prohibits people from acquiring wealth, and allows the publisher to collect money for doing nothing.
Spending money for nothing is pointless. It allows some people to collect money for doing nothing, when they should be out creating wealth.