2009/6/7 Robert Rohde <raro...@gmail.com>: > On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Robert Rohde<raro...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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. I suppose we wait for the Supreme Court to make everything wonderful, then ... - d. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
