[Foundation-l] Why don't we re-encode proprietary formats as Ogg?

[David Gerard]

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