Many places don’t enforce those laws for simply torrenting.

Some countries (US) ask the ISP to send warning letters and might disable the internet. In other countries law firms get personal details from the ISP and send a costly letter of a thousand Euro for a single infraction like in Germany.

I would ideally like to convert the library to h.265 or even AV1 if I can make it work.

Unless you’ve downloaded remuxes (which I doubt), I’d seriously recommend redownloading instead of converting your existing files.

h.265 and especially AV1 take a long time to encode by CPU, and hardware encoding won’t give you any space savings, unless you’re okay with losing much details.

Redownloading is most definitely faster, will result in more space savings for the quality you’ll get. PS: Unless you’ve got data volume limits, but even then I’d recommend slowly upgrading over time. It’s quite simple with TRaSH guides and giving h.265 a higher score.

Hopefully this change actually helps Element to make money. It was always a problem how entangled Matrix and Element are, simply because Element finances most of Matrix. This seems to change now with the Matrix Foundation having an employee.

Conduit is also licensed under Apache 2.0, so it could also be taken closed source at any point in time. The reason this wouldn’t impact Conduit as much is that there’re other contributors, whilst Synapse and Dendrite are almost exclusively developed by Element.

The CLA is necessary since Element funds the development of their servers by contracting with companies, governments and institutions which have special needs. Publishing those patches might be against their customers wishes.

The AGPL ensures no one else can make proprietary changes but Element because of their CLA. This makes it unattractive for companies and volunteers to contribute to Element’s servers, which isn’t a problem because those contributors didn’t exist in the first place.

As I understand it, the people who feel strongly about this change feel like their trust was betrayed by Element. The others are probably corporation’s like reddit who don’t want to contribute anyway but are now not able to profit off of Elements work.

My opinion is split. On the one hand I like the change to AGPL, since it forces forks to continue to be foss. On the other hand, Element continues to be allowed to license the code differently, so it doesn’t really change that the code could be closed off at any point in time.

The most important question is whether this change will benefit Element. Status quo is companies taking without giving back. Now corporations and volunteers won’t contribute code because of the CLA and AGPL. This means Element hopes those corporations will contract with Element to get access to differently licensed code for a monetary contribution.

I think reddit will just develop their own server, but maybe smaller companies (like in the health care sector) will pay Element.