What I get off this comment is that you think it's "obsolete" to suggest people should pay for typefaces. But typefaces, even moreso than music and movies, take years and years of painstaking work to create, and the truly useful faces are created by a tiny group of people who've dedicated their lives to the craft.
Why do you oppose paying them?
Then, respectfully, you should reread it and then reply to what I actually wrote.
The point is not that I think fonts should be free. I have personally paid the equivalent of hundreds of dollars for pro-grade fonts, because I like my work to look good.
The point is that it's unrealistic for the foundries to expect that instead of paying for a font and then being able to use it, as we've managed in the civilised world for decades, we will now all move to a fonts-as-a-service model, where we will pay ongoing fees for DRM-crippled products served via third party systems out of our control.
There simply isn't any upside to that for the consumer, other than perhaps cheaper experiments with different fonts, which is of very limited value anyway if you're working with a professional agency with access to a large collection of fonts. The downsides, on the other hand, are potentially severe.
I think what you're paying for is convenience.
Not really.
Convenience would be paying for a font and then using it on my web site, just the way I do with photos, icons, and other such resources.
Convenience is not jumping through hoops to integrate with an external service of unknown reliability, understanding non-trivial legal agreements with an industry infamous for trying to screw its legitimate customers, and paying more in a single year for font-as-a-service than I pay for permanent use of a font today just so I can legally use the font on a web site in plain text form instead of via images.
Incidentally, I notice that have mentioned elsewhere in this discussion that image replacement technologies are likely to violate the licensing terms of fonts. As far as I'm aware, there haven't been any significant test cases yet in this area in any major western jurisdictions, and the legalities are far from clear, because the font foundries can only protect their rights up to the extent that copyright law grants them. Copyright law incorporates concepts such as fair use (or your local equivalent). Moreover, in some jurisdictions, the design of a font is not subject to copyright at all, only the specific description (the font files being treated as software for this purpose). Even if the font foundries would like to limit your right to buy a font, put it on a server, and have the server generate renderings of specific text in that font, it's not entirely clear what their legal basis for doing so might be in unfavourable jurisdictions, including the US.
(I appreciate the point you made above about font creators feeling fairly compensated for use of their creations though, thanks.)
I can't give examples, for obvious reasons, but you can probably take my word for this.
Do you have any more info on this? Sounds interesting!
Of course it won't look as good as it would in a pdf for a couple more years, but it's a good start anyways.
Good appearance on-screen seems to be governed much more by basic design characteristics such as x-height, and by the quality of the hinting, and frankly even the serious font foundries suck at those things in comparison to the Microsoft C-fonts that were designed for anti-aliasing, the old stand-bys of Georgia and Verdana that were designed with screen use in mind, etc.
I based my opinion almost entirely on my experience, that even a slight change of font can make a big difference in someone's perception. I've seen people being positively surprised when I use a "different" font for normal everyday text (1-2 pages). Nothing crazy - just a bit more stylish. I also got an impression that using nice fonts (with better visible horizontal lines, etc.) got me an additional point or two at the university (no scientific test of course - I've seen very similar in content, but typographically "nicer" texts getting higher marks - just my opinion)
On paper, I wouldn't necessarily disagree with you.
On screen, however, I doubt the odd pixel makes any significant difference. I'm prepared to be convinced otherwise, but I have yet to see any of these professional font foundries prove me wrong.
I do know that I have bought and paid for several pro-grade fonts, which I happily use in print, but which I wouldn't use on a web site even if I legally could. The on-screen rendering is nowhere close to as good as the fonts designed for screen use that I mentioned earlier.
They seem to exist to provide for the whims of font foundries who want to eat their cake and have it, in a way that no-one else gets. The stock images and icons on web sites can all be downloaded and used on other sites illegally as well, yet in practice this hasn't killed either the stock suppliers or the web in general!
Meanwhile, why would any professional web design firm recommend to their clients that they commit to writing a blank cheque, indefinitely, after the design contract is finished, (edit: and relying on a service outside of their control!), just to keep their site up and running and looking correct?
It's not as if there aren't alternatives for the cases where use of non-web-safe fonts makes a difference: we've been using custom images, even dynamic image replacement techniques, since forever. These don't really scale from occasional uses like headings and pull quotes to the full volume of body text, but for typical body text sizes using custom fonts is unlikely to gain any useful improvement anyway; even most pro-grade don't have the kind of hinting that the Microsoft and Apple standard fonts have.
So I have to wonder, why should the world bend to the font foundries' obsolete business models, when there are numerous alternative technologies available that get the same wow factor where it counts, there are many free fonts available (including a few genuinely of professional quality these days), and there just isn't much of a compelling selling point from the client's point of view to signing up for fonts-as-a-service?