But that does not stop people and companies from carrying on commerce on the Web. Nor should it stop publishers and users from reaping the benefits of an improved typographic diversity for electronic publishing on the Web. The first two can and will be hacked with relative ease. Everyone generally believes that the mechanism is as secure as we can possibly hope for - only governments have the resources required to break it. Sure, there are some very clever programmers, or hackers who can find a way to perform this trick.
Type is the tool that gives form to communication.
Bitmaps can stand in, but they're a poor substitute. They are hard to scale properly, they look bad and read very poorly when they are seen on screens with different resolutions than they were designed for, they cannot be searched for content, they will not reformat when the user changes the size of his browser window, and on, and on, and on. Most usage will be on screen. The Web does not inherently reduce the need or desire to print. Let's get the screen right before giving away the fonts.