On 8/25/06, Austin Hair adhair@gmail.com wrote:
Sure, I've discussed it with several attorneys, and many more have discussed it ad nauseam on the various free software mailing lists. You can read more about MP3's patents and licensing on Wikipedia.
If we're going to being trying to argue from authority on this matter I must caution you that I almost certantly outrank you on this subject.
I frankly do not see how that line of debate is actually going to be productive. Instead we should focus on pratical issues which are material to the foundation.
It's inappropriate for us to make the files second class citizens, the transcoded ones are fairly low quality. It was a mistake to record directly into MP3 format...
Harvard's equipment doesn't record Vorbis. It'd be nice if it did, but it doesn't. Sorry.
Where did I say that they should record in vorbis? I think that would have been a mistake as well (although, a preferable mistake had it been an option, just as recording to higher bitrate MP3 would have been a preferable mistake). The audio should have been recorded as raw PCM. This is a fairly standard pratice. Total audio for all the sessions would have been under 24 GB.
I have made several request to obtain copies of the DV tapes for the sessions that were video taped so that I could make Oggs of the high resolution video and the uncompressed audio. I have offered to pay duplication costs. My requests have been ignored.
I do not remember hearing such a request from you; I certainly wouldn't have ignored it.
The 17 tapes in question are currently en route to George Chriss, whom you might remember from the conference. He's tasked with processing the tapes and encoding video of each session in Ogg Theora, which will be uploaded to Commons as soon as they're finished. I have every confidence in his abilities.
Indeed, he emailed me after my post. I'm glad to hear that it's being taken care of.
and as far as the files go, they don't effectively exist if even *you* can't find them without asking.
I've seen the files with my own eyes, but I don't know where they're posted. Obtaining them hasn't been a priority for me, because I have an MP3 player.
How much money would you have required? $10,000 to get all the audio and video from our sessions into completely free formats for both archival and available live use? I could have gotten you that. No one asked. Kyle was standing the the conference *offering* to record unrecorded sessions, I brought microphones and recording gear (with the hopes of doing a wikimedia choral session, but that didn't end up happening).. and no one could confirm that we had *permission* to record the sessions.
You're right, we never asked you. We're good, but we're not clairvoyant.
Everyone was welcome to make their own recordings, as I told everyone who asked me. Many people did.
I stood with Kyle and asked if we had permission to record, you told us you'd get back to us. I guess it was a misunderstanding.
I curious though, what incentive do you have to promote propritary software when there are reasonable free alternative available and people willing to invest their time and money into making them work for us?
Real gave us $100,000, to be split amongst the conference organizers as we pleased. And we would've gotten away with it, too...
hah. Come on, I wasn't intending to imply anything like that. :)
I never suggested that you use RealPlayer, and I'm not even advocating the use of the Real format. Although I don't object to non-free software on principle, I absolutely believe that the formats used for information exchange should be free, and I was very disappointed to learn that Real was the only option for the live streams. Being practical, however, I was consoled by the knowledge that they would be archived in Ogg Theora for posterity, whatever it took to make that happen.
It's fine to talk about could haves and should haves now, but the fact is, we never heard from you before the conference. In the end, I think we still made out okay.
Well you certantly would have heard from me had I not given the impression that everything was taken care of...
I'll agree that we made out okay once the files are actually up on the site. Had the files actually made it up by now (rather than the mismarsh of formats we have now), you never would have heard a peep fom me.
Incidentally, have you noticed the jOrbis (Java Ogg/Vorbis player) links on the wikimania media archive page? I think thats a pretty good move, and a reasonable stopgap until we get the proper player support in mediawiki.