2009/6/7 Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com:
On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Robert Rohderarohde@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.