On Thu, 2002-06-13 at 22:28, Branden Robinson wrote:
> If the consumer can apply a transformation to what he recives that
> perfectly restores the original, I don't see a problem.
I assume here that you mean the consumer can, given the source, recreate
whatever he received from the distributor.
There are a couple of things with publication that need to be
considered:
1) The publisher probably has very expensive, very high-quality type
faces.
2) The publisher probably has very exepensive, very high-quality
software and equipment to do color matching and printing [if this
is, e.g., a work of art].
3) The publisher may do various hand-tweaks of the output, such as
adjusting hinting, kerning, etc.
4) Probably a bunch more things in this vein. I'm not in publishing.
None of the results of these would be stored in the 'preferred form' of
making changes. Yet, they are required to reproduce the work received
from the publisher. Other than the hardware, should they be required to
distribute the software?
If we say 'no', then how do we prevent less extreme cases of my magic
blowfish postscript font? One example of a less extreme version is a
proprietary dingbat or diagram font. Without it, the figures and the
diagrams in the book will probably look like crap. ("This letter A here,
that's a top-left corner")
>
> I'm not crazy about permitting degradation of quality or fidelity. That
> like saying it's okay for Hollywood to restrict our Fair Use access to
> DVDs because they also make a VHS release.
Neither am I. Which would seem to forbid proprietary fonts, software,
etc. in the publishing process.
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