Mild Fuzz

This doesn’t really solve any problem. People that are going to use cufon with commercial fonts have already paid the foundry for the font. The issue is that cufon doesn’t offer even the slightest protection against theft, it is exactly the same as someone buying a font and posting the .ttf file to their blog or whatever.

I think the best thing designers can do is pressure firefox and safari to suppor the @font-face tag which contains embedding protection.

My concern with pulling something from an external source is the same as with any other asset. If the external source is down, your page is slow to load, design looks off, user gets frustrated etc.

Besides, if the font is already purchased I’d not want to pay a separate fee to access the cufon file.

@tea,

Cufón does offer some protection, but that is not the point. This is a suggestion as to how best to apply security, as apposed to the simply circumvented system currently employed.

@jeff

Yes this is true, but how many amongst us use google to store jQuery as apposed to our own sites for speed? If the servers are good enough, then it would be a mild risk.

Granted, paying too much extra for it would have a negative impact, but that would be market driven. Many designers/developers within the industry want to do right by their typographers, but the premium has to balance the benefit, else they’ll quickly return to the less secure methods currently employed.

Unfortunately, it just isn’t a workable solution. First, users would be relying on the hosting and bandwidth of foundries, many of which are small, one-person outfits. Second, you’d need to have everyone agree on a method of authentication of those licenses. There are several other problems, but my eyes are closing, and my brain shutting down.
This far, I think Tal Leming’s proposals make the most sense. Well worth a read:
http://talleming.com/2009/04/21/web-fonts/

Anyway, good that you’re rasing the issue. There certainly needs to be more dialogue.

thanks for link Johno, but my eyes are also heavy. Too heavy for all that green on black!!

After a lot of thought, I think there is something foundries can do to come to a compromise with designers but it will take some big changes to their business process. I am working up a longer response for tomorrow.

I look forward to it

Hey, this is what I was saying –>

http://blog.typekit.com/2009/05/27/introducing-typekit

My concern with pulling something from an external source is the same as with any other asset. If the external source is down, your page is slow to load, design looks off, user gets frustrated etc.

Besides, if the font is already purchased I’d not want to pay a separate fee to access the cufon file.

What I’m saying is include it in the price.

Besides, most of the time when you purchase fonts the EULA restricts web usage.