Gregory Maxwell wrote: "Protection fee" is an interesting choice of terminology. The irony is that if the licensors make too much of a fuss it could kill their cash cow. The one thing that supporters of free software and materials can't afford to spend a lot of money on is PR and advertising. As more and more good free alternatives become available, the proprietary industry's strongest argument (software reliability) becomes less credible. When they screw up their publicity by being too aggressive against the little guy it only drives the customers toward the free alternative. Those managers of proprietary enterprises who attack every little violation of the company's rights as a threat to the bottom line can easily find that such actions are counterproductive. It's a bit like industry's counterpart to our wiki-lawyers. :-) Ec

On 2/13/06, Ilya Haykinson <haykinson(a)gmail.com> wrote: I don't see how transcoding to a proprietary format would be much different than offering up our text alternative non-free license. I also see the assertion made multiple times that the number of users who can view this content is greatly diminished... but I've yet to see this substantiated with data. If you count users who must install a codec as unable, then you must also realize that the proposed alternative proprietary formats are also not installed by default on a great many (a majority?) of computers. The complexity of getting working players to users is high enough that a great many video sites such as video.google.com and youtube are using flash and java based players.

On 2/13/06, Ilya Haykinson <haykinson(a)gmail.com> wrote: How would this be any different than offering to sell the text under a non-copyleft license? Surely there are some additional avenues of distribution which could be better exploited if only we dropped that pesky copyleft... How did 98% of web browsers get flash? I'm fairly confident that they did not ship with it, windows doesn't. In most cases I'm aware of, flash was installed via the flash website by the user. I'd suspect that in many of those cases flash was installed in order to view a website with far less popularity than Wikipedia. Our primary mission is not just to provide content, it is to provide free content. The unfree encyclopedia has already been done several times over and many of them are better *encyclopedias* than what we have today. Some of them even make substantial amounts of content available at no cost via the internet.

On 2/14/06, Andrew Lih <andrew.lih(a)gmail.com> wrote: I don't agree. If I take some content, place it in a safe, and make it illegal for people to open the safe unless they agree to pay me money and abide by certain other conditions, and then distribute it widely... Well.. I can *claim* all I want that the 'content' is free, but that would a meaningless claim. The content would be just as unfree as if I'd added an oddball license which places odd restrictions on the next hop of the distribution chain. The difference between putting a file in a proprietary format and putting it behind DRM is slim indeed. Both inhibit the uses for the file for which you'd be naturally entitled, and both can be circumvented by someone with special authority or someone who is willing to ignore the law. Not only is the outcome similar, but there may be little difference legally: Modern compression schemes are a far more complex transformation than the constant addition in GF(2^8) used Adobe's early ebook reader... which someone was brought up on DMCA circumvention charges over. As far as I'm aware, none of the conventional legal players for the suggested formats offer a 'save to non-proprietary-format' button... I would not be shocked to see someone make an argument that using ffmpeg2theora is circumvention. We give people two click access from our media help page to a number of solutions. How can you claim that theora is fundamentally harder to install for someone already at our site? Now, perhaps the media help page could use some improvement. But based on the discussion here it doesn't seem like the people complaining have even looked at it. Well a real player from 1993 (or 2004 for that matter) won't likely play content released for real today. ... But, I never argued that there was as many qt or real users.. Just that the number of QT/Real/Xvid/etc codec users is *far* fewer than the number of Windows desktops because Windows doesn't usually ship with them.... and moreover, that installing theora is just as easy as installing QT/Real/etc. If a user has QT/Real/ or whatever third party video players/codecs installed there are few reasons why they couldn't install the theora codecs. They also prioritize financial gain over all other interests, do you think that Wikipedia should be on the same path?

On 2/15/06, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote: Lets not get too carried away with the metaphors... We're not talking about putting it away where it will not effect the outside world. Would you support the foundation distributing a DRM inhibited copy of Wikipedia so long as there was a free copy available somewhere? If we were to permit encumbered formats what would ensure that there was always a non-encumbered version available if the content was not lost entirely?

On 2/15/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: See Delirium's comment - putting it in an alternative format is for user benefit, not as a sole distribution method. A better analogy - I have a magazine that I distribute for free to the public via a "news rack" on the sidewalk, but I also make it available in places where people have to pay (like an amusement park or night club). Is it non-free simply because I also make it available in a venue where folks have to pay to get at it? I'm no noob, but see below for my experience. The point of the numbers is that there is a much higher likelihood when a user runs across an MOV, MP4 or RM file that they have the codec installed already, so the download/install would be irrelevant. The problem is it took over 10 minutes of noodling around to track down a way that would work, and I would not expect a newbie to be so persistent. Here's exactly what I did on my Windows machine: - Went to Commons.wikimedia.org - Scrolled down one page to Content, By Type, Video; clicked on Video - Category:Video page comes up, a pretty rudimentary page with a list of files - Choose "Dosa_preparation.ogg" (my favorite breakfast) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Dosa_preparation.ogg - Image:Dosa preparation.ogg (Newbie: "Is this a picture? The page doesn't even say that it's a video"). In fact the only indication that it's a video is the category at the bottom of the page. - Click on the Ogg file, Firefox 1.5 downlaods it and launches Winamp (MP3 player) but no video, not even audio. - Go back to file's page, look for help but no indication of how to play this file - Click on Help in left-hand column - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents where the only two mentions of video are: * Creating video * Converting video - Converting video is likely to closest to what I want, so I click on that. The first line: "Wikimedia accepts only video files in the Theora Ogg format. As of January 2006, this format is still in alpha, and only a few video-management tools support it just yet." Further down, in "For_most_operating_systems" recommends ffmpeg2theora - command line utility? No thanks. VLC media player - I have that, let's try that - Go to Firefox download window to manually open the file in VLC - File not actually in the download folder for some reason, need to download again using "Save link as..." - Finally launch VLC 0.8.1, drag-n-drop Ogg file onto it in Windows - does not play. - Go back to "Help:Converting Video" help page, under "Converting Quicktime (.mov) to Ogg Theora" there is a seven step process of how to do it. No thanks, not worth it. Other option is Quicktime Pro. That's a paid product, and I only have the free Quicktime Player. No thanks. - I'm out of ideas, I go to Google and search for "site:commons.wikimedia.org theora" - Result 1 - Commons:File types - No help - Result 2 - Help:Converting video - I was just there - Result 3 - Commons:Media help - Ah looks useful! Was there a link to this from the Ogg page? I still don't know - Got to Commons:Media help, and under Microsoft Windows see "Installing codecs from Illiminable..." At first I think it's a typo with three "I"s or three pipes in a row. :) What they heck are the talking about? Ok, I'll try the Illiminable codec thing. - Go to Illiminable.com, click on codec to download (at 798 kbytes, it will most certainly take longer than 2 minutes to download over a 56k modem, contrary to what the Commons page says) - Run the EXE file to install - Run Windows Media Player, and drag the Ogg file to it - Success, it finally plays! Much of this could be solved if there was a obvious "How to play this" button for each "Ogg" file to the Commons:Media help" but I don't see one. If there is a "two click" way to get to the software, I'm not aware of it. But it would be nice to make it obvious somewhere. -Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 08:51:38AM +0800, Andrew Lih wrote: We all know that he who gives up a little essential liberty for safety deserves neither liberty nor safety ... But what then, must we think of one who gives up a little essential liberty for a -smoooooooth user experience-. Kim Bruning -- [Non-pgp mail clients may show pgp-signature as attachment] gpg (www.gnupg.org) Fingerprint for key FEF9DD72 5ED6 E215 73EE AD84 E03A 01C5 94AC 7B0E FEF9 DD72