On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Robert Rohde<rarohde(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 8:26 AM, David
Gerard<dgerard(a)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.
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.
-Robert Rohde