There’s a lot of talk of web font embedding these days. Dave Shea covers the technology and debate pretty well, as well as showing one (flawed) technique for accomplishing it today. Mark Pilgrim has a much more radical opinion, which also serves as a jumping off point for a very spirited debate in the comments.

Basically, it comes down to this: web designers want to be able to use more than just the web-safe fonts in their pages, which means somehow linking to interesting fonts. Font designers want to keep their fonts from becoming free-ware, so want some form of control over where the product of their sweat ends up. In some ways, it’s a classic DRM battle, but over typefaces rather than songs or films.

There are some good free fonts out there, (also here and here), but not many. The high-quality faces, which require not only good design but good implementation in the form of hinting, cost real money, which money funds their development.

So there’s plenty of discussion about this, but no clear resolution. The browsers are just beginning to support @font-face, so it will become more of an issue in the coming year. Hopefully we can resolve this like civilized people, without the battles the music and movie industries have been relishing.