[theora] Encoding raw to Theora

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 7:57 AM, Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves
<justivo at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/9/09, Ralph Giles <giles at xiph.org> wrote:
>> Well, assuming by 'NC' you don't mean to exclude use for codec
>> development
>
> That's already blocked by ND.  He's choosing the most restrictive
> license possible, the one that only allows redistribution but never
> any modification at all.  Basically, ND-NC = Freeware.

[this has gone OT but I can't leave a clear factual error uncorrected]

Not so:

"The above rights may be exercised in all media and formats whether
now known or hereafter devised. The above rights include the right to
make such modifications as are technically necessary to exercise the
rights in other media and formats" — CC-By-NC-ND 3.0 §2

…and of course, non-competing short excerpts are going to be a free
for all under US law, the creative commons licenses can't waive fair
use.

Not that I think NC-ND is effectively an improvement on "all rights
reserved" for this class of work, but the ND property shouldn't
frustrate codec development. (…Even though some users of ND might wish
and expect it to so because they don't wish to see their 'perfected
art' in lower quality renditions, the license simply does not have
that behavior)

As Ralph observed— the non-commercial clause is more problematic.
Creative Commons's "NC" is pretty much always problematic as the
license itself is vague and interpretations span the space of
possibilities. Once you've drifted off into the realm of consulting
attorneys and making private agreements you've lost the advantages of
standardized licensing.

For our purposes we should probably encourage people to use on of the
free licenses from the list at
http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses#List_of_licenses but failing that
our needs would be met by CC-By-ND; CC-By-ND-NC that the things we
need to do for codec work (excerpting; cropping; resizing;
transcoding) are not considered derivative or commercial uses for the
purpose of the license no matter who performs or why they perform
these activities.