137
How to pirate a font
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
137 points (96.6% liked)
Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
54746 readers
330 users here now
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
Rules • Full Version
1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy
2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote
3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs
4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others
Loot, Pillage, & Plunder
📜 c/Piracy Wiki (Community Edition):
💰 Please help cover server costs.
 |
 |
|---|---|
| Ko-fi | Liberapay |
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Please excuse my lack of knowledge here. Am I under to understand from your post that software that you have purchased from another supplier will check from files that you have bought from this supplier and refuse to use them based on their attestation?
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 I was asking about OP's suggestion that the font might be effectively withdrawn by a third party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.