[OS X TeX] gtamacfonts ligatures: PDF searchability

[Maarten Sneep]

On 28 Mar 2006, at 22:07, Gilles Pérez-Lambert wrote:
> By the way, I found quite strange to ask someone to pay twice for a
> font one already paid with the system. It's not "unfair" use. I know
> fonts are to be paid (and I pay for them) but I don't want to pay
> twice for them just to have them packaged (pfa, pfb, ttf, otf...)
> differently.

Copyright law is strange, and I’m afraid you have seen nothing yet:
In the UK, shops that sell musical instruments, have to pay royalties
for the tunes their customers play in trying out the instruments,
to compensate the composer for “a public performance”. Again in the UK
phonographic industry association wants DJs who rip their CDs into MP3
files to take them to a gig to pay extra for the privilege to do so.

The copyright owner has all rights to a work, and can set the standards.
You may find those ludicrous, I probably agree in many cases (especially
licenses that were drawn up in earlier times, before the age of the
internet), but they are the owner of the copyrighted work, and they can
allow or disallow what you can do with it. If you don’t agree, there is
only one solution: don’t use the typeface (plenty of fish in the ocean).

It is that same copyright law that protects many great works in other
ways (think GPL), so blaming copyright law itself is not correct either.
It is a complex issue, and I think most agree that many record companies
have gone over the top (lawsuits, DRM, …) where a better product might
have gone further. As far as fonts are concerned: The market is not  
very big,
licenses are rarely obeyed, and designing a truly new typeface is
a lot of work and a real craft. As far as I'm concerned, most font  
licenses
aren’t too bad. OTOH, I agree with you that format transformation and  
paying
twice to use a font on the same computer isn’t fair. Unfortunately, this
is not for use to decide.

Maarten

------------------------- Info --------------------------
Mac-TeX Website: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
          & FAQ: http://latex.yauh.de/faq/
TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
List Archive: http://tug.org/pipermail/macostex-archives/