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

[Fæ]

On 18 January 2014 13:41, Andrew Lih <andrew.lih at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 5:37 AM, Fæ <faewik at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> The RFC is non-neutral and unnecessarily complex. With so much
>> experience of trying these things, along with full time expertise, I
>> would hope for a more sophisticated approach from in-house WMF teams.
>
>
> It is actually very complex -- legally and technically. And the MPEG-LA
> licensors did not gear their licenses or documentation towards
> user-generated content, or free culture projects, which makes our job
> harder.

Yes, of course. However the end RFC put to the community need not be
complex. Most of the community will not care about legal or technical
detail, they just want the conclusion.

You may wish to consider whether the technical and legal aspects might
be better explored as essays and included as background in future
proposals, not the meat of the proposal itself. Personally, were I
leading this team, I would make it a requirement that the proposal is
limited to 50 words. Punchy, factual, neutral.

For example, a simple yes/no RFC on adding an ingestion process for
MP4 video upload might now be successful. The legal aspect can be as
simple as "WMF legal has determine this poses no risk to the WMF,
uploaders or reusers, refer to <essay>" and the technical aspect could
be "See <essay> for an explanation of optimized transcoding, workflow
processes and test examples". There's nothing new in keeping it
simple.

Fae
-- 
faewik at gmail.com http://j.mp/faewm