[Wikimedia-l] RfC: Should we support MP4 Video on our sites?

[Nathan]

On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 12:07 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:

> One thing that hasn't come up in the debate is the relative importance of
> Wikimedia's approach to video, given the existing video ecosystem. YouTube
> enables cc-by uploading and has 4 million videos with a free license, and
> 6.5 million videos that are explicitly educational. Are we sure focusing on
> our own base of uploaded videos is the approach best calibrated to serving
> Wikimedia's mission?
>

Actually it did come up, allow me to reproduce the comment in a vote posted
by Brad Patrick (former WMF general counsel):

I agree that the dominant file format means we need to be able to
comprehend what is ingested. But it is not okay to ingest and spew using
that file format if it means we are putting on someone else's intellectual
property yoke. Commons' great benefit to the world is no-questions-asked
reusability, and I don't want to see it compromised in this fashion,
license freebie or otherwise. I'm with User:David
Gerard<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:David_Gerard>
 on this. On the whole it is of far less importance to me as there is no
guiding principal or idea that WMF is intended to be an *exclusive*
repository of anything. Others do nothing but video, and that's great. I
want there to be video, *but it is not part of a grant vision to
out-YouTube YouTube, or Vimeo, or any other huge site with billions of
hours of video*. User:Fuzheado<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fuzheado>
 is right - we lack the present toolset to be able to address such volumes
of video, and I'm not sure that's a bad
thing.--BradPatrick<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:BradPatrick>
 (talk <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:BradPatrick>) 14:45,
16 January 2014 (UTC)

Emphasis is mine. I'm sure smart people have debated this before, can
anyone point me to it?