2009/6/7 Robert Rohde <rarohde(a)gmail.com>om>:
On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Robert
Rohde<rarohde(a)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.