this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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If I have it right, it goes like this. I purchase the font package, the seller includes hidden in the files an identifier so they know it's mine. I share the files across the seven seas. The seller keeps a lookout for their fonts being shared, and spots it in the wild, downloads it and finds out who's it was.
Oh no, I understood the watermarking concern. This sort of thing is famous with with Oscar screeners and electronic books. I was asking about OP's suggestion that the font might be effectively withdrawn by a third party
Like I mentioned in my post, I don't really understand it, thats why I asked.
But I've read https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/dsig and to me it sounds like your OS for example (or any other software) could attempt to verify the validity of the DSIG of a font. If it works similarly to other types of signing, the certificate authority, in this case the creator of the font, could declare a font signed with a specific key invalid and your OS e.g. would then prohibit you from installing it.
But I may be completely wrong here. Maybe nobody is bothering with it, but since we live in DRM hell, I wnated to ask to make sure.
Thanks for explaining. I guess this would be comparable to e.g. Blu-ray key revocation. I suppose it's possible but I'm not sure how likely it is considering the potential downsides, e.g. legal liability, for anyone doing this, compared to I'm not sure what upsides where there's no profit to be found and all costs sunk
Isn't this easily bypassed by modifying the "hidden" part
If you even know what the hidden part(s) is, is the problem.
Maybe is in the metadata as someone pointed out earlier, or it could be an otherwise unused ASCII char that looks different for each user who licensed it when printed out, sort of like a qr code as a single ASCII char.
Or it could be that they simply just check filename, file size and/or md5, all of which can be easily changed.
Files have formats. Anything "hidden" here is destroyed by conversion to a different font format before redistribution.
There is no way of controlling this from the authors side without some sort of DRM.