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

[Erik Moeller]

On 1/3/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Still, it seems very premature to shape our decisions around bandwidth
> concerns which do not yet exist.

It seems very reasonable to me to shape any policy decision around
estimates of its potential impact. In this case, we're not only
talking about storage/backup and bandwidth requirements, but also
about the question of focus for the WMF. All these depend highly on a
number of other variables:
- what scope of videos we allow
- how broadly we include these videos in Wikimedia projects
- whether we want to be able to stream all of these videos, or a
subset thereof, in real time.

Since we haven't settled answers for any of these questions, it's hard
to predict the impact, but it's easy to predict that under an
inclusive policy, with the videos being highly visible and easy to
access, we'd be significantly exceeding current storage and bandwidth
use quickly, even without reliable real-time streaming. This raises
the question whether this is an area the Wikimedia Foundation wants to
expand its focus to.

> How much traffic are we talking about? If we don't know, how could the internet
> archive fairly accept it?

Since the Archive appears to be getting significantly more
contributions than we do:
http://jnana.wikinerds.org/index.php/Form_990-PF_for_Internet_Archive_%282003%29
.. and since they specialize on archiving, I think it's safe to say
that they're in a better position to host these files than we are.
That said, we should ask them -- and other potential providers, such
as Kennisnet -- whether they'd be willing to help us out.


> We have far less video, so we do see less video collaboration..

Video collaboration does not require video hosting in the same place.
See Annodex/Metavid.

> Last I checked, many of the videos that we'd consider hosting which
> that have would not fit our copyright guidelines.  A lot of the full
> length movies for example, are only free in the sense that the movie
> itself was not renewed. The music, plot, and other elements are still
> copyrighted.

Certainly, and while Wikimedia strives for free content purity, that
desire has always been balanced with a healthy dose of pragmatism. A
film is a very large aggregate of pictures and sound; achieving purity
within such an aggregate gets more difficult the larger it gets. It is
still desirable but shouldn't, in my opinion, be the defining
exclusionary criterion. In other words, just because a film contains
some fair use music at some point, or a company logo, it is not
necessarily significantly less worthy of being featured or used within
a Wikimedia project.
-- 
Peace & Love,
Erik

DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of
the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.