Rahul Sundaram wrote:
On 08/18/2009 09:24 AM, gil...@altern.org wrote:
Unfortunately, the legal approach of Mr Sundaram still doesn't answer this
enigma: if proprietary document formatting is just defining an awfully
more complex and secret way of producing bold than <B></B>, then what are
media codecs exactly?
Already answered in the FAQ. Read it carefully.
Rahul
Media formats almost always involve lossy compression There are reasons
for selecting one lossy compression scheme over another that are very
different from considerations of document formatting, which do seem to
be primarily a way of keeping things proprietary. Lossy compression is
still very much a topic of ongoing research. If someone comes up with a
clever scheme for lowering the bit count while minimizing the subjective
loss, that person could reasonably claim it as intellectual property.
I'm not plugging the proprietary software distribution paradigm, just
saying.
Of course, media formats are also entangled with "digital rights
management", which has everything to do with the issues addressed in
your FAQ. Generally these work against usability, data efficiency and
quality.
I won't touch here the debate over music wanting to be free vs.
musicians wanting to be paid and the extent to which DRM accomplishes
the latter, other than to point out that it is frequently and plausibly
argued that musicians are pretty much the last people DRM protects, if
at all.
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