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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?
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
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.
No, somebody sure as fuck doesn't need to use a song from The Villiage People to karma whore. TVP are the real reason I hate the RIAA so much, not the DMCA. Jerk.
*Bashes head off of desk so ringing in ears drowns out that horrid, horrid tune*
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
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.
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
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.