<span class="gmail_quote">2006/10/15, Jimmy Wales <<a href="mailto:jwales@wikia.com" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">jwales@wikia.com</a>>:</span><br><div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you<br>would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of<br>generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be<br>purchased and freed.
<br><br>Dream big. Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase<br>copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you<br>like to see purchased and released under a free license?<br><br>Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific,
<br>be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.<br></blockquote></div><br>That's three times yes, although I would like to extend 'textbooks' to 'non-fiction' more general. Also I think the ideas mentioned are good in the sense that from there speaks an (in my opinion correct) idea that even with a few million dollars, it would be good to make savings through going after commercially less or not viable material. This would be a situation where quantity beats quality.
<br><br>However, at least as important as getting the material would be to have it 1. available, and 2. identifyable.<br><br>What I mean is that it is little worth to have large numbers of whatever material if it is hard for people to come by the material. Best would be to have it available on the web, and I think the money would be well spent that was spent on scanning the material that has been liberated, so that it can actually be accessed from all over the world.
<br><br>The second is of different importance for different resources - for a book, if we know title and author, people can just check for themselves whether it is usable. But a photo collection is worth little if there is no information added on *what* is actually on the photograph. Having photographs of thousands of moderately famous people is worth little unless it actually says WHO is on the photo. Likewise, photographs of past news events would be very good to have, but only if descriptions are provided as to what news event is depicted. 100 pictures of "some politician talking to a group of people" are not as good as one of "Imre Nagy announcing Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact".
<br><br><br>-- <br>Andre Engels, <a href="mailto:andreengels@gmail.com" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">andreengels@gmail.com</a><br>
ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels