Only adds to the efficiency of piracy, and propagates the idea that fonts are free, or really cheap and anyone paying good money for type is out of his mind. That is just damaging to the fontmarket as direct lost sales. For instance by building applets or objects or whatever you want to call them, active executable code, that function as fonts it will be possible to monitor usage of fonts, and based on that, get money for it. This is not unreasonable. The publisher of a certain web document wants the user to see his pages in a particular font, user doesn't really care.
User reads page, font signals foundry, foundry invoices publisher.
If font cannot signal the foudnry it'll lose feautures, or stop working altogether. It can be done and makes sense. Professional fonts are somewhat of a prestige market. But there still is massive abuse of fonts in the professional world. Though it would be nice to be able to wish it away, it won't.