On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Robert Rohde<raro...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 8:26 AM, David Gerard<dger...@gmail.com> wrote: >> It would be a simple matter of programming to have something that >> allows upload of encumbered video and audio formats and re-encode them >> as Ogg Theora or Ogg Vorbis. It would greatly add to how much stuff we >> get, as it would save the user the trouble of re-encoding, or >> installing Firefogg, or whatever. >> >> So why don't we do this? Has it been officially assessed as a legal >> risk * (and I mean more than people saying it might be on a mailing >> list **), has no-one really bothered, or what? > > Patent encumbered formats often have licensing fees when you perform > encoding / decoding at commercial scale. For example, the MPEG > licensing association expects a fee from anyone distributing more than > 100,000 MPEG encoded files per year, and those fees can run hundreds > of thousands of dollars. The WMF has a big enough budget that they > could probably consider paying such fees (and enough clout they might > negotiate a better than average rate), but even so it is still likely > that paying the MPEG tax would require forgoing one or more staff > hires. It's not inconceivable, but such projects would require > looking carefully at the trade-offs involved, and I think in many > cases avoiding proprietary formats makes sense.
Just to be clear, there are potential fees along all the food chain, i.e. encoding, decoding, and distribution. I picked on distribution because it was the one I knew off-hand. Since David is talking about decoding and re-encoding as Ogg, there would be a different set of fees to consider which I haven't looked at. -Robert Rohde _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
