[Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikimedia Foundation's partnership with Kaltuna and loss of freedom

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Jan 17, 2008 9:35 PM, Chad <innocentkiller at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, it certainly looks as though Kaltura is looking for increased
> participation from the Foundation.

Kaltura has been circulating claims about their Wikimedia partnership
for over a month now.. Which is how I found out about it, not through
Wikimedia.   People can claim a lot of things, ... but those things
probably will not happen until all of WMF's leadership is replaced
with silicon valley entrepreneurs. :)


[snip]
> We already delete a  massive number of fair use images daily simply being
> a screenshot of XYZ singer or ABC video game. Are we to think this won't
> happen with video?

Hey, We already have thousands of video files:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Video  No Kaltura
partnership required. ;)

Of course, Video on Wikipedia isn't as exciting as youtube, in part
precisely because Wikipedia isn't a dumping ground for copyright
infringements... oh yea, being an encyclopedia/other *educational*
materials might have something to do with it too. ;)

Making it easier for people to upload video is a really important
task, but doing it would require making mediawiki automatic transcode
on upload, which isn't hard conceptually, but actually implementing it
and making it scale take work that no web mashup startup is offering
to do for us.

Will, someday, Wikipedians be deleting as many copyright violating
videos as images? I sure hope so.   .. But I also hope that by then
new-user education is improved enough to reduce the confusion and the
sheer volume of inappropriate uploads.

We see images uploaded with claims like "I made this screenshot of
Starwars and now I release it under XYZ license" .. Ugh.  Imaginary
property (IP :) ) just isn't intuitive to people in this day and age
of zero-cost instantaneous copying and world wide distribution.
Dealing with that confusion, as I've recently said about other things,
is simply a cost of doing business. It still beats paying employees to
write all this stuff. ;)

Really video is not special in that regard.  ... Except for the fact
that unlike images there are not as many repositories of freely
licensed educational works for us to take from to jump-start our
collection.