On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 8:26 AM, David Gerarddgerard@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.
That said, in my ideal fantasy world the educational value of the free encyclopedia would be maximized by accepting all mainstream formats, performing automatic conversions and providing users with any mainstream format of their choice in return. But such thinking seems to be pie in the sky at the moment.
-Robert Rohde