It's kind of interesting to watch DRM play out across every field of intellectual property - it's as if each successive field that tries it has learned nothing from what happened with music, and is in the process of happening with video. Today's looming IP battle - fonts. I ran across this post (warning - explicit language after the link):

And maybe, just maybe, they'll stumble across Jeffrey Zeldman's excellent interview with highly talented David Berlow and think, "Wow, this guy has over 300 fonts! That's awesome! Where can I download them?" And boy, won't they be surprised to learn that those 300 fonts can only be used offline. Epic fail.

It seems that the foundries are trying to come up with a protection scheme for web usage. You can see what kinds of ideas they have in mind in this Jeffrey Zeldman interview with David Berlow. Zeldman asks him how designer fonts will make it to the browser, and gets this:

The next step is for those who control the font format(s) to define and document a permissions table to be added with all due haste to the OpenType, CoolType, TrueType, and FreeType formats, so that font tool makers can make tools to create, modify and produce this table in fonts. With such a table in place, existing and new fonts can be permitted for the wide variety of today’s requirements, and leave a place for future requirements. In conjunction with this table and treating all current fonts as unlinkable, the modern user agreement, and a robust market should take care of some of the rest.

Epic Fail is right. Who the heck wants to deal with DRM before using a font? The only question is how long it will take to bleed this idea out of the type people. Down in the comments, a Mozilla developer points out that the web would have been crippled had the kind if approach being advocated for fonts been taken with images. Exactly. Like musc, this is about recognizing reality and dealing with it, rather than trying to reshape reality to keep things the way you think they ought to be...