[Foundation-l] Donation of DVDs to Wikimedia Foundation Projects

[Robert Scott Horning]

David Gerard wrote:

>>When it comes to videos the GFDL sucks worse than it does for images.
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>Mmm. How precisely does one tag a video with the GFDL, and what's the
>transparent copy?
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>- d.
>

Imagine, for the sake of the discussion here, that you have a production 
of a TV episode like Star Trek that is available under the GFDL. 
 Assuming that video is available under a GPL-like distribution license, 
you would be free to take all of the fancy special effects and replace 
all of the scenes with William Shatner in them with an actor who 
actually knows what he is doing.  :)

Of you could "insert" additional scenes, or rearrange the order of the 
content in a variety of ways to create something very new.  BTW, this 
was a very popular technique for Russian filmakers during the early part 
of the 20th Century, where they would get hours of "stock footage" and 
with just some simple movie editing tools would "compile" new motion 
pictures.  This has also been a fairly common technique for some serial 
television programs, such as the television series [[JAG]] in some of 
its early seasons of production.

For a "Wikimedia" version of this as a collaborative tool, I would 
imagine that something akin to a documentary could be put together in 
relation to historical footage, making essentially a video version of a 
Wikipedia article.  I think it would be something fun to put together, 
to be honest, especially if you used the Wikipedia article (FA status, 
of course) as the "script" for the narration and dialog in the video, 
with some minor editing.

I'm not exactly sure how you could put a video/audio editing suite into 
a web page format, but I'm sure some creative minds could come up with 
something if we really wanted to try.  Non-web page software certainly 
is available free (as in beer and FOSS) to do this sort of work as well.

More reasonable for "transparent" image, I would imagine that a lossless 
compression technique would be required in this situation, so you could 
uncompress and recompress the image without generation losses.  Of 
course the same could be said about JPEG images as well in this situation.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning