FC: Peter Wayner on Agfa, DMCA, and debate over fonts

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

[Peter is a longtime Politech member and an author of books on cryptography 
and open source software. He has been a regular contributor to the New York 
Times. Previous Politech messages: 
http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=agfa --Declan]

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Date: Wed, 15 May 2002 08:27:18 -0400
To: declan () well com, cp () panix com, mattd () macjournals com
From: Peter Wayner <pcw2 () flyzone com>
Subject: Re: FC: Agfa DMCA debate: Charles Platt vs. Matt Deatherage

I enjoyed the exchange. This just verifies what I've always though: The 
DMCA hurts the artists and the content-creation professionals the most 
because they're the ones who must cut and paste to make a living. The rest 
of the world can go do something else if the VCR/DVD refuses to work.

This was brought home to me one day when I spent an entire afternoon trying 
to change a semi-colon to a colon in a document I prepared. Why did it take 
so long? Because I created a Acrobat file and mailed it to a friend. Then 
the computer crashed and destroyed the original document. No problem, I 
thought. I'll just change the Acrobat file. I own the pro version of 
Acrobat which allows editing. "Not so fast, Font Pirate!" said Acrobat. 
Apparently the font I used couldn't be found. When I rebuilt the system 
file, it was missing.

I don't buy fonts. I'm not that sophisticated. It ended up on my disk 
because some software package gave it to me. Which one? I still have no 
freaking idea. There was no way I was going to spend an afternoon 
reinstalling every piece of software. Who knows where it came from? It 
might have been installed by a sample I download and then deleted and forgot.

In the end, I was able to hack around this by extracting the Postscript 
from Acrobat, editing the postscript file and re-distilling it. It took me 
four hours to come up with this solution.

Now I'm bitter about Adobe and I have deliberately begun avoiding my 
lawfully owned products like Photoshop, Acrobat, and InDesign. This was 
building after I discovered that their secret surveillance software kept 
crashing my Mac. The products are great, but open source alternatives have 
their advantages too. In the past, I would stick with Adobe because of 
their quality. Now I shun them because I'm worried that I'll be abandoned 
and falsely accused in my hour of need. Open source code doesn't do that.

The Content Czars seem to think that we're all just a bunch of pirating 
fiends out here who can't wait to make a copy of something, anything, right 
away. Hah. I'm just trying to get my job done. There's no way I'm going to 
buy professional grade Agfa or Adobe fonts now.  There's no way I'm going 
to buy Fontographer either. I don't need their quality and they just seem 
to be a big hassle. There are plenty of free fonts that are good enough and 
easier to use.


---------------
Two new books: _Translucent Databases_ (http://www.wayner.org/books/td/) 
shows how to add ultra security and privacy to databases. _Disappearing 
Cryptography_ (http://www.wayner.org/books/discrypt2/) explains how to 
camouflage information.




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