FOMS | Main / Licensing

Achievable Short Term Goals:

 - Leading with new technologies, i.e. Annodex.
 - Using patented unencumbered codecs i.e. dirac/theora 
 - Making tools/integration (easy to make/view content)
 - Content model for a creative economy.

Long term Goals:

 - Fighting software patents
 - Leveraging open formats
 - Format conversion service ?
 - Highlighting the restrictions of freedoms inherent in non-free media systems

FOMS: Licensing (Thu 3:30)

Cards

Patented codecs
Handling non-free formats
DFSG restrictions
- General Notes

Legal issues with using various codecs Debian FSG only allows software which is under a 'true' free licence

 - Software patents
 - Legal/technological issues which make playing some media under free software difficult/impossible

Two main routes:

 - Fighting software patents/waiting for patents to expire, to use existing technology
 - Develop our own non-encumbered technologies

Dirac has patents, but held by BBC, free to use (defensive patents, licensed under Mozilla license so in theory irrevocable).

h.264 - patented, expected to pay for use. (for decoding: no licensing fees for the first 100,000 units shipped, above 100,000 units, licensing fees vary between $0.10 and $0.20 per unit - encoding is more)

DRM - downward spiral; could mean things such as binary players, signed kernel, etc to ensure best effort (in a legal sense) was made to implement to protect the content. DRM model in an uncontrolled environment (i.e. the nature of open source) is fundamentally broken.

Promote an alternative model to content producers to release their content under a system that makes them feel protected (the intended end-goal of DRM).

Encourage transcoding of existing 'encumbered' files into open formats; provoke this through somehow further-enabling the content (loose example Youtube; people accept transcoding into lower quality flash as it increases access; annodex etc technologies?). This could be done through a commercial organisation which does this legally through licenses etc.

Lead by example; create open media content, demonstrate advantages (both in terms of licensing & DRM).

Reasons to use free/open media:

 - don't have to pay per to produce (not really a motivational point for most; commercial players are free, money is not an issue to content producers/'player' vendors)
 - leverage free/open projects that utilise this technology
 - technological advantages ?
  - industry adoption: hardware support, et al
    (example of mp3 vs vorbis; problems cited) 

 - open media licences on content to leverage the advantage of a collaborative community.

 - lack of resources

 - not much money behind open media (tools).  things like the linux kernel etc do as they have tangable benefits that companies directly benefit from.  create these opportunities?

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